


meet the morning

by sylwrites



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Neighbors, Burn., F/M, Fluff, Slow Burn, medium burn?, petition for the neighbours tag to include a U, pure trash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-15
Updated: 2017-08-01
Packaged: 2018-12-02 16:42:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 40,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11513349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sylwrites/pseuds/sylwrites
Summary: After three weeks of living on Veronica's couch, an apartment finally opens up in an old building near a line of pretty trees. The neighbours aren't bad, either.





	1. one

**Author's Note:**

> After I proofread this, I noted some similarities in the basic premise to Friends and Big Bang Theory, only in the sense that hallways and apartments are involved. I love Friends and hate TBBT, but this won't be like either of them, I promise.
> 
> Please leave some love - I'm now on tumblr but I still much prefer feedback left here if that's not too picky of me to say!

_When the memory leaves you_   
_Somewhere you can't make it home_   
_When the morning comes to meet you_ _  
Open your eyes with waking light_

  * Beck, “Waking Light”



  


“Well, it looks like a nice street.”

 

Betty drags her attention away from surveying the boxes in the back of her rented U-Haul and stares past it at the huge old trees that line the road. It’s pretty now, and as the leaves turn even more vibrant colours, it’ll probably be gorgeous. “Yeah, it’s nice,” she says to Veronica, then flicks her eyes up at the apartment building beside them. “I’m just glad to be off your couch.” She turns back to her boxes and nibbles on a fingernail thoughtfully as she tries to strategize. Her father had definitely not arranged this truck in such a way that would enable convenient unpacking - but then again, she didn’t have to go all the way home to Vermont to pick up the stored furniture and boxes from her old New York apartment, so she shouldn’t complain. Beggars can’t be choosers, and all that.

 

Her best friend is standing on the street beside the U-Haul, staring into it. “Betty, do you think we’re actually going to be able to carry this stuff all the way up there?”

 

Betty raises an eyebrow at Veronica. “I’m on the fifth floor, it’s not that bad. And there’s an elevator.”

 

“Yeah, but…” Veronica squirms a little, tapping her sandal on the ground. “The couch? It’s probably heavy. And your dresser? We can’t do that!”

 

“Sure we can.” Betty moves a few light boxes to the edge of the U-Haul, then hops down and puts them on the sidewalk. “Just grit your teeth and think of the Spice Girls. Mel B wouldn’t quit and neither will I!”

 

Veronica holds a hand out to Betty as if it’s a statement in itself. “Look at these nails, Betty. This is a sixty-five dollar manicure. I will not break one.”

 

Betty rolls her eyes and starts moving more boxes. She’s not shocked by Veronica’s response; she’s reliable emotionally, but she’s not exactly the ideal moving help. Unfortunately, she’s the only person Betty knows in Boston. They’d met during undergrad in New York, where they’d had a few psychology classes together and had become fast friends. Then, out of pure coincidence, both had ended up moving to Boston afterward: Betty for journalism grad school at Emerson College, Veronica for a fashion design internship.

 

Veronica’s parents were exceedingly wealthy and had purchased her a swanky loft near the seaport; it wasn’t that far for Betty to get to school, but it was a one-bedroom and at some point she had to find an apartment. Luckily, one in a partially renovated older building had come up for rent, a bit further from college but a _lot_ more in Betty’s price range. The area was safe, the building had a gym, and the unit itself was small but nice. She’d put in her name, and a week later here she was: three weeks into September, moving into a building in a new city with her entitled best friend (sweet, but spoiled) as her only assistance.

 

Betty dusts her hands off on her denim shorts and stops to twist her ponytail up into a messy bun, hoping the complete loss of hair on her neck will help to cool her down a bit. When that’s done, she climbs over another box to reach the back of the truck, thinking that if she moves all of the small boxes out of the way, she’ll be able to get some of the larger items closer to the front and then they can figure out how best to tackle getting them into the elevator.

 

Betty is trying to maneuver a box of clothes out from behind the couch when she hears Veronica calling her name. “Just a sec!” she hollers back, then with a valiant effort, manages to lift the box over and onto the couch cushion. She wipes a bit of sweat off of her forehead and goes to the edge of the back, peering around the corner for Veronica. She spots her easily, standing on the sidewalk in her pressed cotton shorts and slinky tank top, talking to - “Of course,” Betty mutters to herself with a small sigh. “She found boys.”

 

There are two of them, non-threatening on first glance, both probably in their early-to-mid twenties like her. Betty’s eyes are immediately drawn to the taller one: he has vaguely olive-toned skin, a striking jawline, and nearly black hair that is partially hidden beneath a grey knit beanie. He’s looking at her curiously, hands shoved in the pockets of his well-worn jeans, and Betty suddenly wishes she’d worn more than just shorts and an old tank top from her high school track days.

 

The other one is a fair-skinned redhead, slightly shorter but bulkier, with a cheerful smile and twinkling eyes that are already trained on Veronica. For her part, Veronica has a hand on the redhead’s bicep and is smiling at Betty, waving her over.

 

Betty hops down and pushes away her annoyance at Veronica in order to summon her best smile. If they were hanging around they probably lived here too, and she really shouldn’t be alienating people in her building so early on. “Hi,” she greets, sticking her hand out to the redhead, who is nearest to her. “I’m Betty. Nice to meet you guys.”

 

“Archie,” the redhead says, flashing a brief but genuine smile at her before turning back to Veronica.

 

“Jughead,” the dark-haired one informs her, shaking her head with what Betty senses is slight reluctance. Clearly, Archie is the more outgoing of these two.

 

“Jughead?” Betty repeats, trying to ensure she’s heard him correctly. “That’s unusual.”

 

He gives her a small smile. “Childhood nicknames don’t age well. The real thing is worse.” He nods his head toward her U-Haul. “Moving in?”

 

Betty nods. “Yeah, I am. V’s just helping me. Or _not_ helping me,” she says pointedly toward Veronica, who is busy flirting with Archie. “Fifth floor.”

 

Archie glances over. “No shit, we live on the fifth floor. Are you moving into the vacant one - what is it, 514?” he asks Jughead, who nods.

 

“Yeah, that’s me,” Betty smiles.

 

“That’s right across the hall from us,” Archie informs her. “Welcome to the building! And the floor. Hey, you girls need a little help carrying some of this stuff up?”

 

 _Oh, Veronica,_ Betty thinks, _you work in mysterious ways._ She catches her friend’s eye; Veronica winks, smiles, then squeezes Archie’s bicep and replies, “We’d love that. You guys are obviously so much stronger than us.”

 

Betty catches Jughead rolling his eyes and does a bad job of suppressing a snort. He looks at her, seems to realize what happened, and has the decency to look somewhat ashamed before nodding. “We’d be glad to give you a hand.”

 

“You really don’t have to,” Betty says, feeling guilty about forcing manual labour on two guys who don’t know her at all - _although,_ judging by the look on Veronica’s face, they’ll probably be getting to at least know Archie a little better. “I don’t really have that much stuff.”

 

Archie walks past her toward the U-Haul, Veronica trailing behind, and stands in front of the open back doors. He points at her long wooden dresser, then appraises both her and Veronica. “How exactly were you two going to carry _that_ upstairs?”

 

Betty frowns, slightly embarrassed about having the obvious flaws in her moving-in plan pointed out to her publically. “Willpower,” she says stubbornly, folding her arms.

 

“Uh huh.” Archie presses his hands onto the floor of the truck and hops up, then offers a hand to Veronica. “I’ll clear the rest of these smaller boxes out so we can get to the big stuff. Wanna help, Veronica?” She nods with an eager smile _(of course now she’ll help,_ Betty thinks) and offers her hand to Archie. He pulls her up as though she’s weightless and grins at her when she giggles from the quick movement.

 

They head toward the back of the U-Haul, leaving Betty standing on the asphalt for a moment. She doesn’t realize that Jughead has stepped beside her until he says in a low voice, “Here we have the male of the species, showcasing his strength and virility to win the female’s affections.”

 

Betty starts laughing and looks over at him. Now that they’re closer in proximity, she can see that his eyes are a sort of haunting light blue colour, made more obvious by his long, dark eyelashes. Once she’s gotten over the initial hit of _wow, he’s gorgeous,_ Betty feels a slight twinge of jealousy. Her annual mascara budget would be a lot lower if she had eyelashes like _that._

 

Jughead grins at her, then goes over and begins to haul the boxes from the edge of the trailer that Archie and Veronica set there. Between the two of them, Betty and Jughead haul them into the apartment building and stack them in the elevator. She takes a load of boxes up to her new unit, essentially drags them all into the kitchen area to get them out of the way of furniture, then goes back down to continue helping.

 

Once her boxes are gone, Jughead jumps into the back of the U-Haul and he and Archie begin to have some kind of strange chat with half-words that Betty thinks is some kind of strategy conversation about how best to maneuver the couch. Veronica looks over at her, equally confused. Betty considers her and Veronica to be pretty close, but they definitely aren’t at the level of half-wordless communication, and she briefly wonders just how long these two guys have known each other.

 

Whatever they’re deciding seems to work, and fifteen minutes later her couch is sitting in the apartment’s small living space. Jughead and Archie bring up her bed frame, mattress, and dresser. Betty makes a point of carrying in her tiny two-person kitchen table, Veronica trailing behind with two chairs. She flops down in one of them once they’re in the apartment, following the example of Jughead and Archie, who are sprawled on the floor.

 

“I don’t know how to thank you guys,” Betty says, closing her apartment door and walking over to her new neighbours. They’re all a little sweaty, but nowhere near as bad as she knows she would’ve been had she had to do this by herself. “You too, V. Honestly.” She wrings her hands anxiously, wishing she’d thought of something better as compensation, and offers, “I can pay in pizza and beer? I’ll order a pizza and then if you give me half an hour, I need to go return the U-Haul and can get beer on the way back.”

 

Archie glances over at Jughead, who nods in response. “We won’t say no to that.”

 

Betty breathes a sigh of relief. “Okay, cool. Um. Preferences?”

 

“We’re non-discriminatory,” Archie answers. “Especially Jug.”

 

Betty looks at Jughead, who shrugs shamelessly. She smiles at that and pulls up an app on her phone, tapping in an order for one all-dressed pizza and one spinach-chicken-feta type that she knows Veronica likes. Betty places some cash on the counter and then grabs her purse, slinging it across her torso. “Okay, I’ll be back,” she says. “If I don’t get lost, anyway.” Boston is huge; she’s still trying to find her bearings. It’s a reasonable warning.

 

She’s almost at the door when Jughead’s voice stops her. “Wait up, I’ll come with you,” he says. “We used U-Haul when we moved in a couple years ago, I remember where it is.” He stands up and gives a mock salute to Archie and Veronica. “Assuming you guys are comfortable here by yourselves, that is,” he adds, a hint of teasing in his voice.

 

Veronica is already standing up to go sit by Archie. Betty smiles a little; V would always be V. “That’s fine!” she chirps, and with a wave, Betty and Jughead slip through the door.

 

Betty heads down the blank hallway toward the stairs, Jughead following behind her. She half-turns to glance at him quickly. “You don’t have to come if you don’t want to,” she says, feeling slightly guilty. “I have Google Maps. I’m sure you guy had stuff to do today.”

 

Jughead shrugs. “I don’t mind. Plus, if I know Archie - and I do - they’ll be making out on your couch in ten minutes. I don’t really want to sit there and third-wheel that.”

 

Betty laughs as they descend in the stairwell, but a thought crosses her mind and she _has_ to check on it. “He’s not an asshole, is he?” she asks. “Not to be rude, just looking out for my friend.”

 

“Nah. Archie’s dated a lot, but he’s not a player. Not purposely, anyway. He’s a good guy. He just likes people, usually in a romantic sense. But he’s got the purest of intentions, I promise you.”

 

“Good.” Betty pushes the door open to the lobby and then slips through the main building door, holding it open for Jughead to pass. “What about you?”

 

Jughead glances over at her with an arched eyebrow. “What about me?”

 

 _Really smooth, Cooper,_ she thinks to herself. “Are you - uh - any significant others?”

 

Both eyebrows shoot up briefly, then drop to their regular place as he looks forward at the U-Haul. “Nope.”

 

Betty bites her lip against that information and goes around to the driver’s side. She hauls herself into the seat, feeling unreasonably short with the height of the cab and the height of her company. She starts the engine and tightens her messy bun in the mirror before putting her seatbelt on and getting the truck into gear.

 

Save for giving a few directions, Jughead is quiet until she’s out of the neighbourhood and on a main road. “So what brings you to Boston?” he asks finally, setting his arm along the armrest in the door.

 

“School,” Betty answers, glancing in her rearview mirror. There’s a lot more traffic here than in Vermont, and she didn’t drive in New York. “I’m getting my Masters at Emerson. I’ve actually been here for a month already, living on Veronica’s couch until I could find a place in my price range. Are you from the area?”

 

“No, Archie and I are from upstate New York, a little town called Riverdale. But we both have been here since after high school.” He points at an upcoming exit. “Take this. He’s going to Berklee to be a music therapist, but he plays gigs around town a lot too - it’s sort of a whichever takes off first kind of thing.”

 

Betty takes the directed exit, noting that Jughead seems to answer all of her questions with responses about Archie first and not himself. She understands the desire to keep some things private - god, does she ever - and she worries briefly that she’s prying too much. Still, she hates awkward silences, so she continues. “And you?”

 

“I actually go to Emerson too,” he responds. “MFA in Creative Writing, just started.”

 

“No way!” Betty exclaims. “How have I not - wait. You do look _sort_ of familiar. Were you in the Monday morning one-week intro-to-grad studies?”

 

“Yep.” Jughead clears his throat. “What are - uh, what are you taking?”

 

“Journalism. But I’m interested in their Publishing MA too, I might look at that after this, it’s only thirteen months, so.” Betty turns onto another street and spots the U-Haul depot up ahead on her left. “Wow, that’s such a coincidence. How do you like it so far?”

 

He nods, as though that’s some sort of answer. There’s a beat of silence, and he adds, “It’s good. I don’t _love_ structure, but the MFA is pretty flexible, so.” He points again. “Just pull in here, then we can get an Uber back. There’s a liquor store not far away from our apartment that we can walk to.”

 

Betty obeys, and once the truck is in park, she pulls up the booking email on her phone, recalling that at the bottom there were return instructions. They get out of the truck, take a quick look to make sure it’s empty, and then Betty heads inside to exchange the keys and sign off on paperwork. Jughead waits outside, and when she pushes her way back through the doors upon finishing, he’s squinting at the setting sun.

 

“I booked an Uber,” he informs her. “Should be here right away.”

 

“Thank you,” Betty says, walking toward him and stopping at his side. “Seriously. That would’ve taken Veronica and I a lot longer.”

 

Jughead shrugs again. “No problem. Plus, Archie wanted to beat his chest a little, so at least now he won’t feel the need to kick my ass at Counterstrike tonight just to feel dominant.”

 

Betty assumes that’s some sort of video game and nods in response. She picks at her fingernails through the brief silence. It’s slightly awkward, but not as bad as she would’ve expected; there’s something sort of unassuming about him that is somehow putting her at ease. He’s looking across at the road, his shoulders set forward a bit like there’s something on his back that’s too heavy to stand upright with. World-weary, Betty realizes, despite his age. She can relate to that.

 

A dark blue Honda approaches and slows upon spotting them. Jughead nods at her and opens the door for Betty, who slides into the backseat. He follows her and gives the driver instructions to what she assumes is a liquor store. They spend the ride in silence, neither them nor the driver seeming to want to engage in banal chit-chat, and when they exit the vehicle Betty can see Jughead give a rating of five stars.

 

It takes them five minutes to pick out a few six-packs of beer and ten minutes to walk back to the apartment. By the time Betty opens her new unit’s door, she figures they’ve been gone about forty minutes. The pizza has obviously just arrived, as it’s still hot and steaming on the counter, and as predicted Archie and Veronica are kissing on the couch.

 

Betty smiles warmly at them but clears her throat to interrupt the moment. “Sorry - we’ve returned.”

 

“With beer!” Archie states matter-of-factly, rising to his feet. “You want one, babe?”

 

 _Babe,_ Betty thinks to herself. He moves quickly. Still, Veronica doesn’t seem to mind; she responds with a chirpy, “Yep!” even though Betty knows that her friend is really not even a fan of beer.

 

“I think I have plates somewhere,” Betty says, realizing that it’s rude to assume that people will eat pizza off their hands. She glances around at the mess of boxes in the kitchen, trying to scan the sides for a label that reads “cutlery and plates”.

 

“I’ll grab some from our place,” Jughead says, touching her shoulder. “Don’t bother with that yet.”

 

His hand is warm. “Thanks,” she says softly, taking a couple of steps after him when he disappears into the hallway.

 

Jughead returns in less than a minute with four plates in hand. Veronica cheers unnecessarily loudly. “To the rescue!” she exclaims. “Man, meeting you guys was the best part of today.”

 

Veronica is usually a little hyperbolic, but in this case she’s correct. “That’s definitely true,” Betty says. “Honestly, I can’t thank you enough. And once I have my kitchen unpacked, I’ll cook you something better than pizza.”

 

Jughead has already grabbed a few slices and is in the middle of wolfing one down when she speaks. He shakes his head. “Pizza is great.”

 

Veronica holds a hand up. “Wait for it, Broody. You’ll wanna take her up on it. Betty is an incredible cook.”

 

“Jughead will never voluntarily turn down food,” Archie laughs, selecting a few slices of the all-dressed and going back to the couch. “He’s got a hollow leg.”

 

“Two hollow legs,” he corrects, swallowing the bite that he’d been chewing. “And two hollow arms.”

 

Betty smiles and eats a piece of pizza. She’s not super hungry for her share, but at the rate that the guys are eating, it’s doubtful that having too many leftovers is going to be an issue. She spots a particular box sitting on the floor - special, a banker’s box with purple tape on the side - and excuses herself for a moment to carry it into her bedroom. Betty sets it on the carpet and opens the lid, carefully lifting out and unwrapping a picture frame.

 

She places it on the bedside table and stares at it for a moment. “Here you go, Pol,” she whispers to the photo, touching her sister’s image. “You made it to Boston after all.”

 

\--

  



	2. two

_ “The world is made of people telling stories.” _

  * Chuck Palahniuk, Stranger Than Fiction



  
  
  


There’s a U-Haul parked outside their apartment building. It’s big and white and orange and impossible to miss, but Archie juts an elbow into Jughead’s side and says, “Look, a U-Haul!” anyway.

 

Anything beyond the obvious is often lost on Archie, so Jughead has learned not to expect subtlety. “Yeah, looks like that empty apartment is gonna be filled,” he comments.

 

“Looks like a girl. Two girls.” Archie points. That’s factually accurate; there’s a blonde girl tucked away in the back of the U-Haul and a brunette with slightly darker skin - Latina, Jughead identifies - standing on the asphalt in front of it.

 

Jughead wants to slap Archie’s pointing arm down, but he settles for sighing. “The empty apartment is a one-bedroom.”

 

“Maybe they’re lesbians. Or one’s a friend.” Archie lifts his hand higher, flattening his palm in a wave to the brunette girl. “Hey! I’m Archie!”

 

Of course Archie has to talk to every pretty girl he sees. Why wouldn’t he? What would life be like if Jughead had the kind of best friend who could stride past a girl and actually arrive at his intended destination instead of stopping all the time? He imagines that it’d probably be a little more boring, but also less awkward and definitely more productive. Still, it’s Archie, and Jughead has proved through decades of friendship that he’d follow him anywhere if he needed it, so he trails behind as Archie goes up to talk to the girl.

 

As it turns out, it’s not Archie’s girl that’s moving in, but the blonde in the U-Haul. And in an even more interesting development, Jughead knows her. Sort of, anyway. He doesn’t know her name, or what she does, only that she also goes to his grad school and she’s in a program that’s not his. And that she’s fucking gorgeous, from the top of her beautiful face to the bottom of her feet. He sees her in the hallways sometimes - he thinks maybe she also works on campus, because sometimes she’s wearing slightly nicer clothes than most of the students, and he’s seen her around after getting off shift at  _ his  _ on-campus job. She’s usually wearing jeans or a skirt at school, but today she’s wearing denim shorts and apparently this girl also has incredible legs.

 

Then he talks to her, and she’s really, really nice. Her name is Betty, which is such a nice-girl name to begin with, and she has a pretty smile and soft hands. And it all just fucking  _ sucks,  _ because Jughead has made it years without letting girls distract him and apparently  _ now  _ he’s going to meet a girl who turns his head twice, just as he’s launching his efforts to finish an MFA.

 

He recognizes that the Jones family has always had a penchant for the melodramatic, but  _ seriously.  _

 

He and Archie end up helping Betty and the brunette - Veronica, he learns her name is - move all of Betty’s stuff upstairs, then he goes on a U-Haul return-slash-beer run with Betty. He spends most of the drive staring out the window in his regular comfortable silence, and apart from a couple of awkward exchanges near the beginning, Jughead is glad to observe that Betty also seems okay with shared quiet time. They go back to the apartment and eat pizza, then eventually he and Archie wander back across the hall.

 

“I’m going on a date with her tomorrow,” Archie informs him as soon as their door is closed, flicking the deadbolt closed with minor triumph.

 

Jughead looks over at him. “Is there a need for a first date if you made out with her an hour after meeting her?”

 

“If I want to actually date her, yeah,” Archie says, landing a playful punch on Jughead’s shoulder. “And I do. This girl is interesting, Jug. She’s been places, she’s seen things, she’s funny. I like her a lot already.”

 

“That’s great, buddy,” Jughead says honestly, tipping an invisible hat at him. He’s been friends with Archie for almost all of his twenty-four years, and in that time he’s pretty sure Archie has found his One True Love at least ten times. The thing was - as he’d said earlier to Betty, when she’d been concerned about Veronica falling for him - that Archie meant it, every time.

 

Archie smiles and strides over to the living room, sitting heavily down on the couch with a distinct  _ thump.  _ “Games?”

 

Jughead reaches over and grabs the X-Box controller, then flops down beside Archie. “Only if you’re prepared to lose.”

 

\--

 

Two days later, Jughead wakes up to the sound of his always-indelicate roommate coming home at six-thirty in the morning. 

 

There’s a crash, but Jughead isn’t sure what’s fallen. He doesn’t really care, either - the only thing of value they own is probably the TV, and if Archie has managed to break the TV by entering through a door that’s across the room from it, then the TV deserves to get broken. What he does care about is the fact that he’s being awoken a full fifteen minutes before his alarm goes off. And yeah, okay, Jughead is happy for Archie because  _ clearly,  _ his date with Veronica went very well. 

 

But he stole fifteen precious minutes of sleep on a Tuesday, Jughead’s longest day of classes, and for that, the redheaded motherfucker was going to get an earful later.

 

Now that he’s awake, Jughead figures he should probably just get up. But  _ ugh,  _ mornings. He was a night owl, for sure, but even that isn’t strong enough to describe just how much Jughead hates mornings. He’s never found anything redeeming about any of them so far in his life, and there have been thousands upon thousands by this point. He can hear the coffee pot in the kitchen begin to percolate and thanks his past self for buying one with an automatic setting. Jughead drags his feet off of the mattress and spends two minutes summoning the courage to sit up. He grabs a t-shirt and slips it on, then stands up and shuffles out of his bedroom. 

 

His first stop is the bathroom to pee, then he heads to the kitchen to fill a travel mug with coffee so he can bring it into the shower with him. It was something he’d discovered a couple of years prior, and now it’s weird for him to shower without Her Holiness Caffeine ready to drip into his veins at a moment’s notice. (Jughead has thought long and hard about it, and he’s settled on the assumption that if caffeine were to be personified, it would be a woman. Only a woman could provide him with the kind of pleasure that caffeine does on a daily basis.)

 

(What? He’s a feminist.)

 

Archie is still in the kitchen when Jughead gets there, leaning up against the counter and drinking a giant glass of water. He nods his head when he enters and tips the rest of the glass back to empty it before wiping his mouth. “Morning, Jug.”

 

“Morning.” Jughead reaches out sleepily for the coffee pot. “I suppose this means your date went well?”

 

Archie grins and shrugs. “Yeah, it went pretty well,” he agrees, looking like the cat that ate the canary. “She’s coming to my gig this weekend.”

 

“Ah.” Jughead pours himself a mug of coffee and takes a long sip of the burning nectar. “That’s nice.” 

 

“You should come, too.”

 

Jughead lowers the mug. Archie stopped inviting Jughead to watch him play years ago - not because Jughead doesn’t like going (he still attends a lot of his shows, if the scheduling works) but because it doesn’t really matter. If there is a particularly important show, then yes, he’ll for sure be there. If it’s just a regular gig -  _ eh.  _ He’s seen Archie perform hundreds of times, and he supports and believes in his friend, but he cannot watch the same concert six times in a month. “Why?” he asks suspiciously.

 

Archie looks sheepish. “She wants Betty to come with her, but she says Betty isn’t going to want to be a third wheel.”

 

“Ah.” Jughead nods in understanding and screws the top onto his travel mug. “So you’re calling on your professional third wheel to make a fourth.”

 

“Something like that.” Archie yawns. “So, will you? Please?”

 

He will, obviously. He knows Archie would do the same for him, despite the fact that there’s very little chance of Jughead being in that situation. But he was once homeless and destitute, and Archie was there for him. The least he can do is go sit in a bar with two pretty girls and watch him sing. Still, Jughead likes to think that it’s good for Archie to hear “maybe” once in awhile - with a face like that, he doesn’t hear it a lot - so he shrugs and says, “I’ll think about it.”

 

Archie seems to accept this. He presses a closed fist to Jughead’s shoulder and smiles. “Thanks, dude. I’m gonna try to get a couple hours of sleep before class. Night.” He brushes past him toward the hallway; a second later, Jughead hears his door click shut. 

  
Jughead trudges into the bathroom and starts the shower with a yawn. Fucking Tuesdays. He’s got class, then he has to work at the bookstore - not that  _ that  _ is much of a complaint, since the campus bookstore is an amazing job. He gets to look at interesting literature all day and occasionally ring up purchases from students. Now that he’s nearly a month into the semester, the traffic has died down a little, so it’s not even that busy either. He makes surprisingly decent money, which is always good to supplement his funding, though on an hourly basis it still pales in comparison to what he gets from his occasion moonlighting as a valet once tips are factored in. He’s taken a valet shift at the restaurant tonight too, which is really the primary contributor to his bad-day mood. Money is great, but sleep and having time to write are even better.

 

Once he’s out of the shower, Jughead throws on a pair of jeans and a light sweater. It’s late September, and even though the past weekend was hot, Monday had brought with it a cool breeze that promised to stay for the rest of the week. He grabs his messenger bag and slings it over his shoulder, then laces up his boots and heads out the door.

  
  


Jughead’s early class goes pretty well; he manages to participate enough that his engagement in the subject matter is obvious to his professor, but not so much that he draws much attention. He has an hour before his next one, so he takes his laptop and crosses the street into Boston Common. He sits on the edge of the expansive park, leaning against a tree for shade, and starts typing. He gets a few pages done, but pauses when he notices a familiar blonde head passing by. It’s definitely Betty; she’s wearing skinny dark green pants and a collared white shirt, and carrying a beige-coloured backpack that Jughead recognizes from her apartment. 

 

Jughead briefly debates calling over to her but stops himself, figuring that she probably has better things to do. So he turns his attention back to his laptop and gets a few more sentences in before he's interrupted by the sound of Betty’s voice. 

 

“Jughead?”

 

He looks up at her. So maybe she didn’t have anything better to do after all. “Hey Betty!” he says, pretending like he hadn’t just noticed her walking in front of him. “What’s up?”

 

“Just on a break,” she says with a smile, lifting a hand to the strap of her backpack and hoisting it higher on her shoulder. “Felt the urge for a coffee and figured I could go to the Thinking Cup on Tremont to get a little walk in before I go to work. Want to come?”

 

Jughead glances back at his laptop. He’d been on a surprisingly good roll considering that he usually doesn’t get very much done when he’s sitting outside - there are so many distractions, like the glare on his laptop and people walking by (including pretty blonde neighbours) - and for a moment he thinks,  _ no,  _ he should sit here and keep the momentum going. On the other hand, it’s Betty, and even though she’s basically a stranger, he’s so goddamn curious about her. She’s gorgeous but doesn’t seem to have the aura of entitlement that other beautiful women he knows have; that said, she carries herself with a purposeful confidence that suggests determination. Judging by the twitch in her fingers as they curl around the strap of her backpack, Jughead has a hunch that it’s had to be earned.

 

He has to get to know her better.

 

So Jughead closes his laptop and shoves it in his bag with a casual nod of his head. “Sure,” he says, “I can always go for a coffee.” He stands up and slings the bag across his chest, then falls into step beside her. She’s still a good six inches shorter than him, but slightly taller than he remembers; a quick glance to her feet reveals low-heeled ankle boots that seem to be responsible. “So where do you work?”

 

“On campus,” Betty replies, veering slightly to the right so they can take a more treed pathway. “I’m the assistant to the project manager of a research project in the communications faculty. It was really lucky, actually. I have a minor in comms from my undergrad in New York, and one of the profs there put me in touch with the PI on this project.” She shrugs. “The project is really interesting, but my work isn’t groundbreaking or anything. I mostly organize conferences and flights and that sort of thing, seems like. I have funding, but this is just some nice buffer room for me financially. What about you?”

 

Jughead dodges a puddle from the previous night’s rain and then falls back to her side. “Same sort of deal - funding but a couple side jobs for cash. I work at the campus bookstore, which is really boring task-wise but easy. Then occasionally I take some weekend shifts as a valet. It sounds dull, and it is, but the tips are surprisingly great. The arrangement I have is pretty non-committal too, so I can drop it when I’m busy and pick it up again when I’m not.”

 

“That sounds awesome,” Betty agrees. “Tips are great. I used to be a server through undergrad, and even though I don’t miss the late nights and the casual sexual harassment, I do miss the tips.” She laughs. “But I’m glad to be out of that at the same time.”

 

He nods, knowing exactly what she means. There’s nothing wrong with being in the service industry, but he’s worked in it long enough to hate the passive way that wealthy patrons’ eyes pass over him as they hand him their car keys. He’s still a person, even though he’s there to do a job.

 

“So Veronica and Archie’s date seemed to go well,” Betty comments after a few beats of silence, directing them toward the side of the park where they can reach the street. “Veronica texted me saying she had a great time.”

 

Jughead snorts. “Archie didn’t come home until this morning, so I’d say so.” He slides his eyes to the side to glance at Betty and notices the small smile that creeps onto her face at his words. Genuinely happy for other people, he notes - a somewhat rare quality these days. Thinking of this morning reminds him of what Archie had asked him, and he clears his throat to press the issue with Betty. “Apparently she’s going to see him play this weekend.”

 

They cross the street, vehicles slowing to the white lines as they walk. When they reach the other side, Betty looks over at him briefly. “Yeah, she wants me to come with her, but I don’t know.”

 

“He’s pretty good,” Jughead offers. “His songs tend toward the depressing, but melodically they’re solid, if you were worried about that.”

She shakes her head. “It isn’t that. It’s more that I don’t really want to be the third wheel with a couple when they’re in that first stage of a relationship. You know, where everybody is amazing all the time. Veronica especially is - I love her, but kind of unbearable with the lovey-dovey when she’s got a new boyfriend.” Betty wrings her hands a little; she seems caught in her own politeness.

 

Jughead laughs. He’s been party to Archie’s parade of girlfriends for long enough to know exactly what she means. He was probably going to go anyway, but she has a slightly concerned look on her face that makes him want to say yes purely so it will go away. Besides, if Archie’s lovestruck expression earlier that morning was any indication, he’s going to be seeing a lot more of Veronica, and by extension Betty (he hopes, anyway). So he nods. “Yep. Um. I think I’m going to be there. Not sure if that would make you want to go even less, but--”

 

“Why?” she interrupts, slowing her pace suddenly.

 

He’s confused, and briefly worried that he’s said something wrong. “What?”

 

“Why?” Betty repeats. “Why would that make me want to not go?”

 

“Oh.” Jughead shrugs and scratches his neck. Nobody’s ever called him on his self-deprecation before. “I dunno. I’ve never been much of a draw, I guess.”

 

Her eyes are heavy on the side of his face. His curiosity makes him look over at her; she’s observing him carefully. “I find that hard to believe,” she says softly, slowing as they reach the door to the coffee shop.

 

Something in her tone makes his ears grow hot, but she doesn’t say anything further. Jughead opens the door for her and follows her inside, letting the distinctive smell of ground coffee beans overpower his senses so that she can’t anymore.

  
  


He thinks about Betty all throughout his second class and only manages to focus on work once he gets to the bookstore because of a blow-up fight between his manager and a student whose annotated textbooks they won’t return. Jughead ends up having to call campus security and makes detailed note of the encounter so that he can tell his sister about it during their next phone call. Other than that, the shift is uneventful, and by the time he is on the way back home the only thing that he can think about is how hungry he is.

 

But then Betty is on the T on the way back to the apartment, and his thoughts snap back to her. He doesn’t notice her until they’re only a couple stops away from home. She’s tucked into the corner with earbuds and a book that she’s got open but isn’t reading, and she looks contemplative. Jughead’s instincts tell him to leave her alone, but his body is doing something else, and before he knows what’s happening he’s sliding into the seat in front of her and turning to the side.

 

“Hey,” he says, “fancy meeting you here.”

 

Betty’s thoughtful expression immediately vanishes from her face, and a bright smile replaces it. “Hey Juggie,” she says. He thinks he sees her cheeks briefly turn pink as the nickname slips out of her mouth, and he smiles a little to reassure her that it’s fine. Of all the names he’s had,  _ Juggie  _ is probably the least objectionable. “How was work?”

 

He tells her about the fight. Her jaw drops when he adds in the bit about campus security and her eyes twinkle, so he makes sure to elaborate on every detail that he remembers. They get off the train together and walk the couple of blocks home in near-lockstep, casually shit-talking entitled brats like the girl from the bookstore. 

 

They reach the hallway to their apartment in a time frame that has Jughead wishing the walk was longer. Betty slips into her unit with a friendly wave and a “see you tomorrow probably!” He watches her door close all the way before opening his own, thinking how glad he is (for a change) that Archie made them stop to talk to a girl. 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for all the love, you guys! I hope you enjoyed this one, too. Let me know what you thought!


	3. three

_This is not the sound of a new man or crispy realization  
_ _It’s the sound of the unlocking and the lift away_

  * Bon Iver, “Re: Stacks”



  


Betty tries really hard not to complain, as a general rule. It’s a holdover from her childhood, just another thing among many that she had to be perfect about _(nobody’s interested what’s bothering you, Elizabeth; just smile and push through it)._ It’s taken Betty years to recognize the harm that her parents’ expectations did to her and her sister. While she’s tried to let go of some of those perfections, not complaining is something she’s consciously held onto - because Alice, for all of her straight-backed stepford smiles and pink collars, had a point: _nobody cares._

 

However, today _sucks._ She woke up late and didn’t have time to use the flat iron, so her hair is a mess of waves around her shoulders. There’s a stain on her sweater that she didn’t notice until she was getting onto the T on the way to school, and any effort she made to fix it seems to have just made it more obviously visible. Classes went okay, but Betty’s already behind on a major assignment and her anxiety is not letting her handle it well. Once she got to work - usually a place where regardless of what happens, she gets to leave any drama at the door - Betty was bombarded with several mid-level crises around the conference she’s trying to schedule for February. This ended with her being on hold with American Airlines for an hour and a half and led to her returning to her apartment far too late to fix herself for Archie’s gig.

 

And to top it all of, Betty is pretty sure she’s getting sick.

 

So here she is, standing in front of her closet, with a time deficit of twenty minutes. Veronica is supposed to meet her at the venue (a bar that is mercifully not far from her apartment), so Betty isn’t worried about getting a table, but she doesn’t want to be late for Archie’s particular set given that that’s the entire reason she’s going. She keeps her dark-wash jeans and trades her stained sweater for a soft grey tank top and a slim-cut black and white plaid flannel shirt (recently purchased in order to fit in with the city’s apparent aesthetic; she’d noticed a concentration of hipsters in Boston that rivalled even the middle-class areas of gentrified Brooklyn), then grabs her purse and hurries into the hallway.

 

Her phone buzzes as she’s trying to lock the door. Knowing it’s Veronica, Betty stalls with her keys hanging out of the lock and grabs it. **_You on your way yet?_ ** Veronica is asking, to which Betty hurriedly replies, **_Just walking out the door, see you soon, so sorry V_ ** _._ She shoves her phone in her back pocket and turns the key to lock the deadbolt. She drops her keys in her purse and is nearly at the door to the stairwell when the sound of a door opening makes her turn around.

 

It’s Jughead, wearing a dark-coloured plaid shirt and jeans, fiddling with his keys in the lock. Betty breathes a sigh of relief; if he hasn’t headed out yet, then clearly she won’t be too late. He notices her a second later, once he’s locked the door and turned down the hall, and raises a hand in greeting while he pulls earbuds out of his ears.

 

“Hi,” she says, smiling. “I thought I was going to be late!”

 

Jughead shakes his head as he approaches. “You’ll be perfectly on time. He’s up third, I think. Over the years I’ve perfected the art of timing my arrival for these types of things.” He puts a friendly hand on her upper back as they mutually steer toward the stairwell. “After the first hundred or so shows, you learn to start registering the time better.”

 

Betty opens the door and starts down the stairs. His hand is warm on her back and she’s a little sad when it drops in favour of holding onto the railing as he descends behind her. “Not a fan of live music?”

 

“No, I am.” Jughead hesitates briefly, as though he’s not sure quite how to phrase something, then continues. “I’m not sure how to say this without sounding like an asshole, but - look, Archie plays two or three times a week, right? His set is usually anywhere from half an hour to an hour, and he’s always playing with at least two other acts or bands. Even if I was to go to one of those shows per week - I dunno, between school and work and _my_ actual hobbies, I just don’t always want to spend my time that way. So going for just him is kind of a compromise.”

 

Betty nods slowly and pushes the door to the lobby open once they reach the ground level. “I get that.”

 

Jughead beats her to the building’s door and holds it open for her. She steps through with a grateful smile and follows him to the right, southward down the block. They pass by the large trees that Veronica had initially noticed when she’d moved in; their leaves are now turning and falling, and the street looks beautiful with their rich colours. Betty is suddenly hit with the image of a poster on the wall of her then-thirteen-year-old sister’s bedroom: tall trees, in full autumn bloom, adorning the campus grounds at Harvard University. She swallows hard against the small lump that begins to form in her throat and is grateful when Jughead starts talking again.

 

“Y’know, aside from the day you moved in, I think this is the most dressed-down I’ve ever seen you.”

 

Betty chuckles, feeling the remaining melancholy slip away. “You usually see me before or after work,” she explains. “Though - I know, it’s academia. Nobody dresses nice. I guess it’s just a habit. My parents always liked us to dress nicely.”

 

Jughead nods slowly. “Us?” he asks. There’s a gentle tone in his voice that hazards on wariness, as if he can somehow already tell that the otherwise innocuous question may not be so typical with her.

 

“My sister and I,” Betty says simply. She doesn’t elaborate, and he doesn’t push her for any more detail.

 

They reach the MBTA station and hop on the train for a few stops, traveling in a comfortable silence until Jughead signals that they’ve reached the appropriate stop. Betty gets off the train and starts up the stairs to the street. When she reaches it, his hand brushes against her back again, and Betty can’t help the tiny flip of happiness in her stomach at his touch.

 

Veronica is sitting at a table close to the front, near the left side of the stage. She waves when she sees Betty. Betty takes note of her friend’s navy blue dress, which is complete with a thinly jeweled belt and a plunging neckline, and feels instantly under-dressed. Betty shrugs off the feeling and smiles as she approaches the table.

 

Veronica has a drink waiting for both of them - a whiskey sour for her, a tall pint of stout for Jughead. “Whoa, you guys look like you walked out of an LL Bean catalogue,” she remarks. “Adorable.”

 

Betty blushes a little and is about to respond when Jughead plops down in a chair across from Veronica, plucks a sliced cucumber from the salad in front of her, and comments, “We actually planned our outfits on the phone last night.”

 

Veronica raises her eyebrows. “That’s cute,” she says, winking at Betty. “Should I put an order in for a miniature beanie and some flannel onesies?”

 

Betty’s face is burning with embarrassment at Veronica’s insinuation; surely her friend can’t be _that_ in her head. Jughead doesn’t seem bothered by the joke, even winking exaggeratedly at her, and Betty isn’t sure if that’s because nothing seems to faze him or because the idea of procreating with her is so laughable that it’s not even worth being embarrassed over.

 

“Is Archie in the back tuning up?” Jughead asks Veronica. When she nods, he stands up. “I’ll be right back, just gonna go wish him luck.”

 

As soon as he’s gone from earshot, Betty turns to Veronica with the darkest glare she can muster. _“Veronica._ I can’t even - flannel onesies?!”

 

Veronica looks at her seriously for a moment, then starts laughing. “Oh come on, B. I was teasing _him,_ not you. He so obviously wants your ass.”

 

“He does not.” Betty is mortified. She doesn’t have terrible esteem or anything - she’s in pretty good shape, and she figures she’s decent-looking - but she’s never exactly been the first one picked. Such is the life as the best friend of a girl like Veronica, who is not only beautiful but outgoing and worldly, particularly in comparison to a small-town girl like her. Jughead has been friendly to her, sure, but it’s unlikely that he’s interested at all.

 

“It’s a great ass.” Veronica shrugs. “He’s cute too. Model-worthy cheekbones. You should go for it.”

 

Betty gives her a look. “You just want double date opportunities.”

 

“Oh Betty.” Veronica reaches across and pats her hand. “You say that as though I won’t make you guys come to that kind of thing anyway.”

 

Betty rolls her eyes and doesn’t respond, figuring that Veronica is probably right. Which is fine; she likes Jughead, she likes Archie, and hanging out with them more would be fun. She pushes down the idea of anything more than that. She’s just being realistic: Betty is intimately familiar with the feeling of grand disappointment, and she’s not willing to set an expectation that she’s not in control of meeting. Not anymore.

 

Jughead returns a few minutes later, and then immediately after that Archie starts playing. Veronica sits on the edge of her chair and holds her hands dramatically in front of her throughout the duration of his set, which Jughead seems to be responding to with a deep eyeroll. Betty smiles a little to herself and turns back to Archie on stage. Despite the worsening headache behind her eyes, she enjoys the music. His songs are nice - maybe not incredibly original or groundbreaking, but nice. She can see how he could become popular, especially amongst the female crowd; when he’s done, she joins Veronica in giving him a standing ovation. Jughead doesn’t stand, but he does hold his hands above his head to clap, which Betty figures is probably pretty good considering how many times he’s likely seen this exact set.

 

Archie comes to their table after he’s done. He smiles into the kiss that Veronica gives him and sits down beside her with an eager expression on his face. “So, what did you guys think?”

 

“You were amazing,” Veronica says with a supportive nod. “So romantic and sad, your songs. I loved it.”

 

“Thanks, Ronnie.” Archie kisses her again and then looks at Betty. “Betty?”

 

“I liked it too,” she replies honestly, smiling at how happy her friend looks with Archie’s arm around her shoulder. “You did great!”

 

“Thanks.” He beams. “I’m gonna grab a beer. You guys want anything?”

 

“No thanks,” Betty says, shaking her head and poking at the half-melted ice in her empty glass with a short straw. “I actually am going to probably take off pretty soon - I have a headache that doesn’t seem to be getting much better while I sit here, so I might try going to bed early.”

 

Veronica gives her a dramatic pout but squeezes Betty’s hand. “Feel better, B,” she says. “We can have post-set drinks another time.”

 

“For sure.” Betty smiles back warmly and stands up, brushing nonexistent dust off her jeans. “I’ll see you all later.”

 

She’s given a small wave and is a few steps away when Jughead catches up with her. “I’ll come with you,” he says loudly, “You get all kinds at this time of night.” He grabs her wrist gently. He begins to weave them through the crowd without waiting for a response, and when they get to the sidewalk in front of the bar, Betty stares at him with a raised eyebrow.

 

“I’m a big girl, Jughead, you don’t need to escort me, nothing is going to--”

 

“I know,” he interrupts, letting go of her wrist and rubbing the back of his neck. “Sorry. I wanted to leave and that was an easy out.”

 

“Oh. Okay.” Betty isn’t sure why she’s a little disappointed by that answer. She refuses to dwell on it and instead smiles cheerfully, letting the thought of her warm, cozy bed dull her headache. “Well, let’s get going I suppose!”

 

When they’re on the T home, Betty’s stomach grumbles so loudly that Jughead can hear it beside her. She hadn’t eaten dinner and had foregone ordering something at the bar in favour of trying to slip out early. Jughead is mercifully nice about it, and instead of teasing her he informs her about a great diner a couple of blocks from their apartment. When they get off the train he leads her there. It’s a little hole in the wall that’s somehow both greasy and clean at the same time; Jughead confesses that it’s his favourite place to get takeout, apparently reminding him of a restaurant in the small town he and Archie are from.

 

She orders a chicken sandwich and side salad to go; Jughead gets a burger and fries. They walk home somewhat slowly. Betty steals a couple of fries from his bag and earns herself a derisive snort when she offers him some of her salad in exchange. They part in the hallway, and ten minutes after eating Betty is already passed out in her bed.

 

\--

 

Her cold doesn’t get better over the course of the next week; instead, it gets worse. Much worse. By Wednesday, she is full-blown sick. Her head suddenly feels like it’s sixty percent of her body weight and the rest of her feels impossibly weak, her body moving forward only by the power of kleenex, acetaminophen, and dextromethorphan.

 

Unfortunately, Betty’s responsibilities don’t stop just because her immune system has gone on strike. The conference she’s trying to organize at work is somehow going poorly, since apparently the proposed attendees do not understand the concept of a submissions deadline (despite the bare minimum requirement for all of them being a Ph.D). She managed to trudge her way through her morning classes, but by the time she arrives at work to try to put out the scheduling fire, her body has all but called it quits.

 

Her boss takes one look at her and sends her home despite Betty’s protests. Betty takes her work laptop home with her anyway, hoping to get a little bit more done once back at her apartment. She almost falls asleep on the T home, but her mother keeps sending her text messages and the buzzing keeps her awake. Alice Cooper is, as always, desperately concerned with her daughter’s eating and exercise habits; Betty sends a few messages back informing her that yes, she’s been working out at least three times a week, and no, she hasn’t been binging on empty carbs. Particularly lately, since food is the last thing on Betty’s mind. The amount of energy required to cook something is more than she’s willing to muster right now; perhaps after she gets a little work done and has a nap, things will be different.

 

Betty takes the stairs to her apartment and instantly regrets it. It takes her twice as long, but she manages to get up to her unit and practically collapses onto her bed. She lets herself wallow in common cold-induced misery before the need to blow her nose forces her up and into the bathroom. Afterward, she changes out of her work clothes and into a pair of comfy joggers, then sits on her couch and tries to unravel the knot tied by five different academics with brilliant minds and no common sense.

 

Her mother texts again at three o’clock - **_I sent you something in the mail that should be arriving today. Please check and report back to me_ ** _-_ so Betty has to drag herself off the couch and go downstairs to the mailbox. She pulls a long cardigan on over her thin undershirt, grabs her keys, and begins to make her way down the stairwell. It takes her an embarrassing amount of time, but it’s the goddamn common cold and Betty is a _Cooper._ She’s pushed through it before and she will now, too. She reaches her mailbox and retrieves the long envelope with careful handwriting that is indeed waiting for her, then goes back to the stairs and begins to open it as she climbs slowly.

 

It’s full of pamphlets, Betty realizes quickly, leaflets from a pharmaceutical rep at her mother’s doctor’s office, all advertising two new drugs to treat depression and anxiety. She lets herself roll her eyes at her mother’s audacity - even from miles away, she’s trying to control her - and folds the papers back into the envelope. She’ll have to respond to her mother later, a kind lie that _sure, mom, I’ll ask my doctor about them,_ conveniently leaving out the secret detail that she hasn’t taken prescriptions for over two years now.

 

Betty’s halfway between the third and fourth floors, hand weakly clutching the railing, when it happens. Her feet are heavy, her head is pounding, and she’s really regretting not just taking the elevator. She lifts her right foot to bring herself another seven inches to her couch but somehow misses the step and falls.

 

It’s almost like slow motion - Betty knows she’s falling, the stairs are getting closer to her face, and the only thing she can do is push her left forearm out in front of her to block the impact. It works, but her right hand loses purchase on the railing, and she slides down the four steps she’s just climbed until she lands in a heap on the short landing that breaks up the flights.

 

She lays where she lands for a few moments, not moving. Maybe she’s broken her neck. Maybe she’ll just die here, and they can make after-school specials and post warnings about her - _pay attention on the stairs, or you’ll end up like Betty Cooper! -_ and her mother will be consumed with the guilt of knowing that it was her demands which sent Betty down to the main floor to begin with.

 

Or maybe, she can get the hell up and be an adult, Betty thinks, no matter how unappealing that option is.

 

Of course, the end to that particular journey is her couch - her soft, comfortable couch, where her head can sink into the pillows and her eyes can close and the blanket will caress her skin and…

 

“Betty?”

 

Her eyes snap open. Everything is blurry at first, but when her vision clears she’s able to focus on the person standing in front of her on the landing. She half-recognizes Jughead’s concerned face in the same moment that she realizes she must have fallen asleep on the hard linoleum. “Juggie?” she asks to confirm.

 

“Yeah.” He crouches down in front of her. “What are you doing laying here?”

 

Betty closes her eyes. “I think I fell.”

 

“Christ,” he swears. She can feel his hands skimming the sides of her legs, then her arms, and her head. “Are you hurt? I can’t see any - why are you still sitting here?”

 

“Sick,” she mumbles, forcing her eyes open again. “But I’m okay. Just working up the nerve to get back upstairs.”

 

Jughead looks at her with a disbelieving expression. “The nerve, or the energy? Did you go to school today?”

 

“Yeah, but my boss made me go home.” Betty reaches out for the railing, hoping to use it for leverage to get herself up, but it’s beyond her grasp. She can’t stop the grunt of frustration that escapes, but just as she’s working through the concept of pushing herself on her ass closer to the stairs, Jughead grabs her hands.

 

He presses the toes of his boots against her slippers to stop her from sliding and hauls her up by her arms. Betty sways a little, light-headed from the sudden movement, but Jughead lifts her arm around his shoulders and puts his around her waist. “Let’s get you upstairs, Betts,” he says casually, “pretty sure you’re a fire hazard just sitting here.”

 

“Thank you,” she says, trying to manage as much of her own body weight as she can. “This is embarrassing.”

 

“What are neighbours for?” Jughead quips. “By the way, forget what I said last weekend. _This_ is the most dressed-down I’ve ever seen you.”

 

“Ha ha,” Betty grumbles, her feet reaching a new landing. She notices the black “5” on the back side of the door and breathes a sigh of relief. _So close._ “Did you think I slept in pressed slacks and pencil skirts?”

 

“No, you seem more like a patterned-shorts kind of girl.” Jughead helps her down the hallway, stopping when they reach her door. He leans her against the wall. “Don’t fall.”

 

She rolls her eyes; she’s not _that_ weak. Hallways are okay. Stairs are hard. Still, Betty lets the wall take most of her weight and wordlessly hands Jughead the keys to her apartment. When he gets it open, Betty takes a shaky step forward, to which he lets out an amused snort. She expects him to stand close to her so she can put her arm around his shoulders again, but instead he slips one of his arms under her upper back and one beneath her knees and lifts her up.

 

“In you go, sickie,” Jughead says, carrying her through the doorway and into her apartment. “Bed or couch?”

 

“Couch, please,” Betty says, hoping he attributes the pink flush on her cheeks to her cold. He’s a lot stronger than she expected him to be. Betty briefly wonders what else he could surprise her with, then he’s setting her down on the couch and going back to close the apartment door.

 

 _Bliss._ Her couch is soft under her back, just as she’d dreamed. Betty has no idea what time it is, but finding out requires her to open her eyes, and they’re closed again somehow. A warm blanket is laid across her shoulders and tucked under her feet, then Jughead’s voice says quietly, “Get some rest, Betty.”

 

Betty wants to argue - she didn’t finish what she needed to for work, she has school projects to work on, and her mother still needs to be texted back - but she’s spent all of her energy helping Jughead drag herself back here, and sleep sounds really fucking good right now. So instead, Betty sinks further into the soft material, turns her head into her pillow to block more of the light, and lets him win.

  


She wakes up a few hours later to the smell of chicken soup. It’s pathetically domestic and so apple-pie that it hurts, but Betty loves chicken soup. Cliches exist for a reason, she supposes, though usually when she has soup during a cold it isn’t brought to her by her hot brooding neighbour. This time is the exception: Jughead is leaning over the coffee table, setting a hot bowl down carefully. His eyes flick to Betty’s once the soup is safe, and the corners of his lips quirk upward.

 

“My own secret recipe,” he informs her.

 

Betty pushes herself up on her elbow, fully aware of the amount of cleavage that she’s probably exposing and unable to care until she’s eaten something. “Really?”

 

He laughs and shakes his head. “No. It’s Campbell’s. But hopefully it’s still good.”

 

“It will be,” she assures him, managing a little smile. “Thank you, Juggie. Really. This is above and beyond.”

 

“My pleasure.” Jughead clears his throat. “You should eat that, and get some more rest, then eat again. Your phone is just there beside it - I put my number into it, so if you need anything text me. I’m just across the hall and my only plans tonight are school-related, so I’ll probably be begging for an excuse to take a break.”

 

Betty is leaning over, dragging spoonfuls of soup into her mouth, and nods at his words. “Will do.”

 

Jughead rubs his neck again, which Betty can recognize by now is a nervous tic. She has many of them herself, but not all are quite as obvious as his. For a few moments, she wonders what he’s nervous about - she’s the one who had to be dragged upstairs into her own apartment - but then he leans over and gives her a quick kiss on her head, and she realizes, _oh._

 

“I’ll check on you a little later,” he says, then he turns on his heel and is gone.

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for the response to this story so far, it's been so great. You're all lovely.


	4. four

_The ghosts that we knew will flicker from view,  
_ _And we’ll live a long life._

  * Mumford and Sons



  
  


Jughead hates October.

 

For one thing, it’s his birthday, which this year Archie mercifully all but ignored. They’d had pizza and watched a movie, following in the grand tradition of double-features that had been established back at the Bijou in Riverdale, but other than that, there was nothing. No fanfare, no presents, no balloons: just the way Jughead liked it. A casual silence as one day turned into another, like always.

 

Birthdays aside, October also seems to bring the heavy workload of mid-semester assignments. Now that he’s in grad school, he doesn’t really have _tests_ the way that he’d had in undergrad, but October and November still mean late nights with his laptop. They also signal the beginning of meetings with his supervisor, which comes with the expectation of progress on his major project - in his case, a novel, which has not been going well.

 

He should be working on it, or at least on one of his minor assignments. There is always more to do. But instead, Jughead is standing on the curb in front of a fancy French restaurant, wearing black pants, a white shirt, and a goddamn vest and bowtie in a horrible dark red colour. Thankfully, there’s no stupid driver hat, but he’s not allowed to wear his beanie either. He might as well be naked.

 

The silver lining is the two hundred bucks in tips he’ll have raked up from this evening alone. Jughead grew up poor, the son of an alcoholic father and a mother who was both too young and not at all ready to be one. As a result, he knows that money is both the most and least important thing in life. When there is none and basic needs are not being met, it’s everything in the entire world. But once that slight threshold is crossed, once he can pay his rent and buy food, it’s nothing. That said, Jughead understands how it can become addicting: like on most of his valet shifts, there’s cash burning a hole in his pocket and all he wants is for it to grow heavier.

 

Not that he has any extravagant plans for his money - no. He’s not that kind of person. At most, Jughead will buy a new sweater, but it’ll probably all go into a savings account for emergency situations. He’s usually pretty careful with his money now that he has a small cushion of it, but he still likes to collect a little extra through these shifts every now and then. Even if it means needing to have a bit of a later night so he can get his writing done - he does his best writing after midnight, anyway.

 

That’s the plan for tonight. When he’s in an Uber on the way home after work Jughead is already thinking of the revisions and edits he needs to do on his outline. He almost stops at the diner for food but then remembers the cookies that Betty had brought over the day before, and figures he can snack on those instead. They’re chocolate chip and somehow are both crunchy _and_ soft at the same time; apparently, Veronica hadn’t been lying when she’d said that Betty was a good cook.

 

She’d been bringing over various baked goods for a couple of weeks, ever since he’d come home after school and found her slumped over in the stairwell. For a moment, Jughead had thought the worst - she’d fallen and broken her neck - but after a second it became obvious that while she was a little bruised and banged up, the thing that was hurt the most was her ego. And her throat-slash-nasal cavity, both of which seemed to be horribly inflamed by some sort of death cold that she had. Since she lived alone, he’d helped her up to her apartment and made her soup while she napped. Archie and Veronica had teased him a little when Betty revealed how he’d taken care of her, but Jughead had dismissed that with the claim that he would’ve done it for anybody.

 

And partly, that’s true. Clearly, something is wrong if someone is laying in a stairwell unconscious; of course he would help anyone. But Betty is different. She’s a mess of contradictions, the kind of girl that seems both to carry the world on her shoulders but also to be fully capable of handling the burden - on the surface, anyway. She’s always marching around with purpose, handling one thing with her left hand and dealing with another with her right, like some kind of millennial superwoman. Seeing her laying there in sweatpants and a tank top, eyes and nose puffy with a bad cold, was bad enough; knowing that she was too weak to get herself back upstairs easily was something else altogether.

 

It had made him sad, sure, but mostly it angered him. Of course she needs help. Of course she’s not invincible. Even when he’d gotten her back to her apartment, she’d had what was obviously work stuff strewn across her coffee table. Everybody needs somebody, he’d heard once, and if she has nobody else close by, well - maybe he could help out a little. He can reheat soup in a can. It’s not difficult. He can put a blanket on her shoulders. All of that is easy - and if they’re friends, shouldn’t be too out of the ordinary. Betty has been so nice to him, the least that Jughead can do is make a bad cold a little easier on her by helping out at her apartment. It’s not unreasonable.

 

But then there’s the kiss he’d pressed to her head on a whim, and that is the one thing that Jughead can’t rationalize away.

 

He’d done it because he wanted to, that much is obvious to him in retrospect. It had just seemed to happen in the moment, like the most natural thing in the world was to help your new neighbour into her place, make her soup and then fucking kiss her on the forehead. As soon as he’d left and gone back to his apartment, Jughead had been overcome with embarrassment and fear that Betty was going to be so weirded out by his behaviour that she would never speak to him again, leading to what would inevitably be a mortifying, unbelievable conversation where Archie Andrews would have to teach him about boundaries.

 

Luckily, she seemed to take it in stride, and the next day he’d woken up to a couple of thank-you texts from Betty. Her cold passed in a few days, and by the end of the weekend she was delivering homemade cinnamon buns and cookies and even fresh-made bread, which Jughead can’t remember ever actually having before. The most recent cookies are chocolate chip, but there had also been batches with peanut butter and pecans. Jughead cannot possibly pick a favourite, but judging by Betty’s apparent love for stress-baking, he’ll never have to.

 

He makes a beeline for the cookies as soon as he walks in the door, shedding his stupid valet uniform as he goes. The lights are off, so he assumes Archie is either out for the night or already in bed. Jughead’s hand is halfway to a cookie when a sharp giggle pierces the silence of the apartment, followed quickly by a very loud, very feminine moan.

 

 _Jesus Christ,_ he thinks.

 

On a whim, Jughead takes his phone out and texts Betty. **_If you want a front-row seat to the audio of Veronica and Archie banging, my apartment is a great place to be._ **

 

She responds right away, which he thinks is odd considering it’s nearly one in the morning. He’s always thought of Betty as more of a wake-with-the-birds, sleep-with-the-angels type. **_Oh dear! Do you have headphones?_ **

 

 **_Yeah, but I think the damage is done,_ ** Jughead responds, wandering into his bedroom. He pulls on sweatpants and a threadbare grey sweater that’s so old, Jughead actually remembers wearing it in tenth grade. He tugs his beanie back on his head and begins to wander back into the living room in search of his laptop. His quiet journey is interrupted outside the door to Archie’s room by the distinct sound of skin slapping together.

 

As if on cue, Betty texts him again. **_I have a comfortable couch if you need an out_ ** _,_ she’s offered. Jughead stares at his phone for a second, then glances over at the coffee table where his laptop sits. He grabs it and his notebook, then before he can second-guess it, Jughead walks across the hallway and knocks on her door.

 

Betty has a look of surprise on her face when she opens the door, like she didn’t actually believe he’d take her up on it. She’s wearing pajamas, a pale orange long-sleeved shirt and white shorts with what looks like pineapples patterned across them. “Hey,” she says with a smile. “Veronica too loud?”

 

“Yeah.” Jughead wrinkles his nose. “I’m happy for them and everything but I do not need to actually _hear_ Archie’s balls hitting--”

 

“Oh my god, stop!” Betty says, clapping her hands over her ears with a giggle. “Too much information.” She stands to the side and gestures to her apartment. “Come on in.”

 

“Thanks.” Jughead steps in and closes the door behind himself. “I brought my laptop, in case - uh - I’m a bit of a night owl. I planned to do some writing, if that’s okay.” He glances down and notices that she’s barefoot. Her hair is no longer in its regular ponytail either; instead, it falls around her shoulders. (She’d worn it the same way when they’d all gone to see Archie play a couple of weeks prior, and he’d been waiting for her to repeat the hairstyle ever since.)

 

“Totally okay,” Betty says cheerfully. “I’m gonna be awake for a bit but if you want to work I can hang out in my room.”

 

Jughead sets his laptop down on her coffee table and turns to look at her. “I’m not kicking you out of your own living room, Betty. My work can wait.”

 

She nods slowly, then perches on the couch and folds her legs underneath her. “So were you out tonight?” she asks curiously.

 

Jughead sinks down on the other end of the couch and tries not to stare at Betty’s legs. “I was at work. Valet shift at the restaurant. Those rich types like to eat late and stay even later to drink expensive wine.”

 

“Mm, expensive wine.” Betty puts an obviously fake dreamy look on her face.

 

He laughs easily. “I’m not much of a wine drinker. Actually not much of a drinker at all - couple of beers max at once usually.”

 

“Really?” Betty tilts her head. “I’m not much of a heavy drinker myself, but that’s mostly because I’m a lightweight.”

 

Jughead bites the inside of his cheek thoughtfully. This is usually the point at which he would change the topic of conversation or make up some fake reason as to why he limits his alcohol, but there’s something different about Betty. There’s something painful behind her bright green eyes - exactly what that is, he’s not sure, but he gets the sense that she might understand. So he swallows and says, “Alcoholism runs in the family, so I don’t really want to tempt fate.”

 

For a moment he can’t look at her, afraid of what might be written on her face. But then she reaches across and touches his arm, so he raises his eyes to meet hers. She doesn’t look put off or freaked out - but she also doesn’t seem like she’s pitying him, and that hits him straight in the gut. Instead, her eyes have an almost determined glint in them, and she says, “I think you recognizing that probably goes a long way.”

 

“Maybe.” Jughead looks away again. His eyes fall on a bouquet of fresh flowers sitting on her kitchen counter and he nods in their direction. “Nice flowers. Secret admirer?”

 

Betty chuckles and shakes her head. “Nah,” she says, removing her hand from his arm. “Unless I count as my own secret admirer. I just like having flowers around.”

 

“Full of surprises,” Jughead says wryly, grinning at her slowly. “And here I thought I had you pegged.”

 

“Shut up,” she laughs, pushing at his arm. “Flowers make me happy, and there hasn’t really been anyone to buy me any since I broke up with my last boyfriend over a year ago. So I buy them for myself. And let me tell you, when you’re three hours deep into a reading from Professor Nelson, you need all the forced happiness you can get.”

 

“Oh god.” Jughead runs his hand over his face, quietly registering the knowledge of her ex. “I’ve heard terrible things about him. Brilliant, but not exactly personable.”

 

Betty nods. “He’s a dick,” she states bluntly, making Jughead laugh out loud. She grins and stands up. “Glad you enjoyed that. I’m gonna grab some water. You want any?”

 

“Sure.” He watches her get up and walk to her kitchen. His eyes follow the line of her legs and move upward to her ass and then past that to her slim waist. Fuck, she was gorgeous, on top of being smart and funny. He can’t believe that a girl like this is buying her own flowers.

 

She brings back two tall glasses of water. “Eight glasses a day!” she chirps as she hands him one.

 

Jughead raises an eyebrow. “I didn’t realize you were a health professional.”

 

“I’m not,” she laughs. “Just something my mom used to say to my sister and I.” She conjures a high-pitched voice that seems oddly British. _“‘It’ll keep your skin clear, Elizabeth’; ‘Make sure you stay hydrated, Polly’.”_

 

“Polly,” Jughead repeats, letting the name sit on his tongue for a moment. “Your parents had a thing for old-fashioned names, huh? Betty and Polly?”

 

Betty shrugs. He notices that the corner of her jaw seems tighter as he says her sister’s name, but she’s still smiling. “My mother’s name is Alice. My dad’s name is _Hal._ They probably just wanted company in the old-name group. Besides, Elizabeth is a very popular name! Polly, not so much, but…”

 

 _Right._ Elizabeth. Her full name had slipped his mind until now; obviously, she wasn’t just named _Betty._ “Just tell me Polly isn’t short for Pollyanna and I can move past this,” he jokes.

 

“It’s not.” Betty brings her lower lip into her mouth and looks away, her eyes cast down to her glass of water. There’s something sad about the way she’s looking at it with her brow slightly furrowed. Clearly talking about her sister isn’t her favourite thing, and so even though she’d been the one to bring it up, Jughead decides he should drop the subject. He’s about to ask her another question about school when she suddenly starts to speak again. “Just Polly,” she adds, her voice soft.

 

Her toe is twitching, going rigid and then relaxing in rapid succession. Jughead presses his lips together and then asks, “Is she older than you?”

 

“Yeah, she’s--” Betty stops suddenly and lifts her head. “Well, I guess not anymore. She died a couple of years ago. I’m officially older than she was when she died,” she says, looking past him. Her voice is stunted, like this is a sudden realization, and her eyes begin to grow wet at the rims.

 

“I’m sorry, Betty,” Jughead says. His hand twitches, like it knows it’s supposed to touch her to comfort her the way she’d done for him, and before he can overthink it, he squeezes her foot.

 

She puts her hand on top of his and squeezes back, shrugging a little. “It’s okay. I’m finally reaching the point where thinking about her doesn’t just exclusively hurt.” She lifts her head and gives him a small, sad smile. “It’s actually kind of nice to talk about her a little. My parents don’t really … well, they like to pretend that things are different than they are.”

 

Jughead turns his palm upward and laces his fingers through Betty’s. The move itself is unnatural to him, but something about the feeling of her hand against his feels so familiar at the same time. “What do you mean?” he asks quietly. She hesitates immediately, and he quickly adds, “We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

 

“No, I want to.” Betty rubs her thumb against his and looks at him with what almost looks like gratitude in her eyes. “My parents are - well, they’re kind of crazy. In a hyper-productive sort of way. They had ridiculously high expectations for us when we were growing up. You know how people say ‘nobody’s perfect’? Well, I don’t think Alice Cooper has ever heard that - or if she has, she certainly never believed it. We were supposed to be.” She sucks her lower lip into her mouth again and bites the edge. “Perfect, I mean. She still calls me all the time to remind me to do things exactly her way. Polly was the older one. She got it a little worse than me, I think. And she couldn’t really handle it. She started dating a guy in high school that was into some sort of bad shit. He sucked, as a person, even without the drugs. But I think the rebellion was a big part of the attraction.”

 

“Tell someone not to do something, they’re gonna want to do it even more,” Jughead interjects. He understands that feeling.

 

“Yeah.” Betty nods. “Exactly. And I think by the time she realized that that’s really all it was between them, he’d already gotten her addicted. She overdosed when she was twenty-two.”

 

She’s crying now, quiet and wet. Jughead shifts a little closer and pulls her into his chest, not knowing what else to do. People don’t usually come to him for comfort. Empathy has never been his strong suit. But here, with Betty - he wants to be that person. “I’m so sorry, Betty,” he murmurs, stroking her hair slowly. “That’s terrible.”

 

Betty’s shoulders shake against him for awhile, but eventually the movement stills. She doesn’t pull away. “I blamed them for so long,” she says into his shirt, words muffled slightly. “They act like she died in an accident, like her car hydroplaned in the dark or something, like they didn’t drive her to it with their constant control of everything. I _still_ blame them. But it’s her fault too, and I only recently started to accept that.”

 

Jughead is silent as he listens, focusing on the rub of his knuckles against her shoulder blade and the softness of her t-shirt under his hand. He’s lost a lot of things in his life, but he can’t imagine losing Jellybean, especially in that kind of way. They’ve spent so many years apart but still, he loves his sister. She’s the only one that gets it, that understands and remembers most of what growing up in their house was like. The idea of losing that, of losing _her -_ he can’t fathom it.

 

She pushes against him gently, and Jughead loosens his grip a bit so she can sit up. Betty swipes at her eyes and gives a brief laugh, shaking her head. “I’m sorry. This is definitely more than you wanted to know about me, I’m sure.”

 

Jughead frowns at the twinge of shyness that begins to creep into her cheeks. None of this was her fault. She shouldn’t have to feel embarrassed about the realities of her past - and neither, he realizes, should he. So he takes a deep breath and says, “My dad’s in jail.”

 

Betty’s head snaps up to his. “What?”

 

“My dad.” Jughead bites the inside of his cheek. “He’s been a fuck-up my whole life, always drinking or in search of the next one, but he got arrested a few years back for robbery and he’s doing five to ten in state prison in New York.”

 

“Jughead, I--”

 

“My mom sucks too,” he continues, the words falling out like a river. He couldn’t stop it if he wanted to at this point. “She left when I was a kid. Took my little sister with her. I don’t talk to my mom anymore, but I still try to keep in touch with Jellybean when I can.” He exhales loudly, and adds, “There. Now you know way too much about me, too. We’re even.”

 

Betty chews her bottom lip thoughtfully and gazes at him. “Thank you,” she says softly, taking his hand in hers. “You didn’t have to tell me all that.”

 

“They’re their mistakes, not mine. I’m not ashamed of it.” Jughead shrugs. “You shouldn’t be either.”

 

She nods wordlessly and then leans her head against his shoulder. Jughead hesitantly lifts an arm around her, which she responds to by nuzzling into his side. She reaches forward and flicks the TV on, picking a random stand-up comedy special from her Netflix menu. He tightens his grip a little and smiles to himself. His laptop - and any hope of progress on schoolwork - has been officially abandoned for tonight, but Jughead can’t bring himself to give a shit.

 

They watch it until the special ends, then put another one on afterward. Betty falls asleep on the couch around 4:00, her face pressed into his shoulder and her leg draped over his. Jughead carries her to her bedroom and tucks her into bed, then grabs his laptop and heads back across to his own apartment. Archie and Veronica have mercifully finished their copulation by that point, and he’s asleep as soon as his head hits the pillow.

 

\--

 

As the month progresses, October doesn’t get any less annoying for Jughead. Even less than a week before the month’s end, October is still going strong, trying its hardest to bite him in the ass. He’s fighting back, spending his nights writing and his days in class and working overtime at both the bookstore and the restaurant, but the fight has been a little too close for comfort at times. The month just needs to end.

 

Not that November is really any better - it comes with its own special, fun type of stress-inducing hell - but at least there’s Thanksgiving, and Jughead _loves_ Thanksgiving. It’s not only because it’s the one holiday where he’s guaranteed to see his sister (thanks to his annual trek to Toledo), but also of course because of all the glorious food. He’ll sit through a stilted, awkward dinner with his mother for two hours with Jellybean and twenty minutes with the turkey, any day.

 

But before that can be a reality, there is still three weeks of hell to get through. He’s in the middle of a major assignment that’s due in a few days and has set up camp in his bedroom to work on it in the hopes of minimizing his distractions. It’s kind of worked; his productivity is pretty high, but his limbs are starting to ache from inactivity and that’s caused a whole problem in itself. He’s crossed and uncrossed and rotated his legs as much as he can, but he appears to have maxed out on his comfort-readjustment, because it stopped being effective half an hour ago.

 

A knock on his bedroom door makes his head snap up. “Jug?”

 

It’s Archie, so Jughead clears his throat and replies, “Yeah, come in.”

 

Archie enters, dressed in athletic shorts and the kind of tank-top that Jughead has only ever seen gym-bro types wear - a group that of course _does_ include Archie. “How’s the assignment coming?”

 

Jughead makes a face. “It’s okay. I hate prompts. What’s up?”

 

“You’ve been in here for five hours,” Archie points out. “Take a break. I’m going down to the gym. Come with me.”

 

Usually - scratch that, _always -_ Jughead turns down Archie’s invitations to the gym. He does go to the gym - he eats too much not to, and the gym is inside his fucking apartment building, so there’s not much of an excuse - but he hates going with Archie, who spends most of the time lifting weights and grunting. Jughead prefers to run on the treadmill or use the rower, neither of which require Archie’s presence.

 

But today, he could really use the movement, so Jughead shuts his laptop and stands from his chair. “Yeah, I’m game. Gimme a sec to throw on clothes.”

 

Ten minutes later, Jughead is on a treadmill across from the squat rack, where Archie is repeatedly descending and ascending with two hundred pounds of metal plates on his shoulders. And despite the weight he’s squatting, he is still somehow managing to harass Jughead about Veronica’s Halloween party. Jughead curses his own stupidity; of course there was an ulterior motive here.

 

“How is Veronica even having a Halloween party?” Jughead asks. “How does she know enough people for that?!”

 

Archie stands up and puts the bar back on the rack, then turns to face Jughead. “I dunno. She just does. Plus I invited a few of the guys. You have to come.”

 

Jughead shakes his head. “Not my scene,” he says, moving to put his earbuds back into his ears.

 

“Come on dude. Veronica wants to make sure lots of people are coming.” Archie drapes his arms across the top of Jughead’s treadmill and increases the speed by one mile per hour.

 

Jughead sighs but picks up the pace a little. “I hate dressing up.”

 

“You don’t have to,” Archie promises. “Come on. Betty will be there.”

 

Jughead’s eyes dart to Archie’s at that news, and immediately he regrets how obvious a move it had been. “Do you know that for a fact, or are you just saying it?”

 

“Fact. She was at Veronica’s planning her costume.” Archie waggles his eyebrows at Jughead. “Yes! I knew you were into her. Come on, man. If you say yes, I’ll tell you what she’s coming dressed as.”

 

 _Ugh._ He wants to know, but he doesn’t want to give Archie the satisfaction. Besides, of course he’ll go to Veronica’s stupid party. He probably would’ve shown up for a bit anyway, but now that he knows Betty will be there, it’s a definite yes. Hanging out with her the previous week had been amazing, and if it wasn’t for hectic work and school schedules on both of their parts, he would’ve probably already tried to make plans with her again by now.

 

 _I’m that guy now,_ Jughead realizes - the kind of guy that will do something just because there's a girl he likes who's also doing it, or who will go somewhere in the hopes of seeing somebody in particular. He hates that guy, has railed and ranted against that guy, and taken a special pride in never being that guy. But somehow, Betty's simple presence has dragged him into that arena anyway.

 

Fuck.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again to all of you for all the lovely comments! You're too kind. Please leave me some more love if you liked this one too.


	5. five

_With finger on her solemn lip,_

_Night hushed the shadowy earth._

  * Margaret Deland



  
  


It’s just shy of ten o’clock, but it’s dark already.

 

Betty’s standing in the kitchen of Veronica’s open-concept loft, trying to decide how many ice cubes to put in the tall vodka and soda that she plans on nursing for the rest of the night. She settles on four and adds a splash of cranberry juice for a bit of flavour, then inserts a straw into the glass. She looks up and around the loft, a little amazed at the number of people that Veronica has managed to wrangle to a party despite having only moved to the city a few months prior.

 

Betty spots Veronica, hostess extraordinaire, mingling in the living room with Archie. She’s impossible to miss in a bright red devil costume, which is mostly just a red leotard, heels, and a headband with horns on it. True to form, she’d made Archie participate in a couple’s costume, so he stands beside her dressed all in white. He has fake wings slung over his shoulders and a halo perched on his head. The devil and the angel, bad and good, dark and light: Veronica had always had a bit of a flair for the dramatic.

 

She catches Veronica’s eye, and a moment later her friend is excusing herself and walking toward the kitchen. Betty tugs self-consciously at the cropped hem of the sleeveless brown top she’s wearing as part of her Daenerys Targaryen costume (Dothraki era). It had seemed like a better idea the week prior, when Veronica was helping her sew the various pieces of the long brown skirt together. She thinks she looks the part, at least somewhat: her hair is crimped and long, she has brown boots, and her makeup is done to be as wide-eyed and Emilia Clarke-esque as possible. What’s she’s lacking, apart from dragons, is Dany’s self-confidence.

 

“Stop pulling at it, you look hot,” Veronica tells her, sauntering over and tugging Betty’s hand from her shirt. “You are a skinny little bitch and everybody here is jealous of your midriff, myself included.”

 

“I can’t help it,” Betty sighs. “I should’ve picked a different version of her to come as. Maybe the one with the super gauzy, billowy dresses.”

 

Veronica gives her a look. “It’s Halloween, B. Embrace your inner Dragon Queen!” She glances over her shoulder. “Where’s your boyfriend? Not here yet?”

 

Betty raises her eyebrows and exhales in a short puff of air, then shakes her head. “He’s not my boyfriend.”

 

“Aha!” Veronica looks triumphant. “But you know who I’m talking about!” She flips her hair over her shoulder. “I stand by my question.”

 

Betty rolls her eyes, but replies, “He had to work at the restaurant. He says he’s coming after.” She has her best casual face on for Veronica’s sake, but truthfully Betty is moderately dismayed that Jughead isn’t here yet. She understands that he needs the cash and doesn’t begrudge him taking the shift (plus, they’ve basically just started to be friends; he doesn’t owe her anything), but she hardly knows anybody at this party, and she’d been comforted by the knowledge that he would be here. There are people from Veronica’s work and still others that Archie invited, but Betty has never been great at mingling in situations like this.

 

With a quick wink at her, Veronica goes back to the living room to talk to a couple of friends of Archie’s. Betty wanders through the loft for awhile, stopping to introduce herself and chat with a few people. Most people are nice, including a friend of Archie’s (and apparently Jughead’s) named Reggie, but Betty still feels awkward. She’s always been the kind of person that everyone likes, but sometimes that can be lonely: everybody likes you, but nobody actually _knows_ you. She knows she’s her own worst enemy sometimes, given that while she’s trying to talk to people at Veronica’s, she’s doing it in such a way that she doesn’t actually have to put herself out there.

 

(“Hi I’m Betty, I’m Veronica’s friend; are you guys having a good time? Can I get you anything?”)

 

Betty checks her phone for the tenth time since she’d arrived two hours prior. There’s still nothing from Jughead, who’d told her he would text when he was leaving work. In the absence of that, she opens Instagram and scans the most recent updates. There’s a cute post from her cousin Cheryl, who for the millionth year in a row has gone as Little Red Riding Hood. Betty likes the photo and leaves a series of heart emojis as a comment, then flicks her thumb up to see more pictures.

 

“Hey, who are you supposed to be?”

 

Betty glances up from her phone and is met with the smiling face of an unfamiliar guy who she guesses is around thirty. He’s dressed as Zorro, complete with a fake sword at his waist, and has a beer in his hand. Betty tries to think if she’s met him before and decides she hasn’t. “I’m Betty,” she greets, sticking her hand out to shake his.

 

The guy takes it, but instead of shaking it immediately he holds her hand in his and takes a slight step toward her. “Danny. I work with Xavier. He met Veronica at a model shoot.”

 

A true random, Betty thinks. This party is a certified assortment of strangers, which she knows is all part of the Lodge approach to social domination. Cast a wide net, then narrow down. “I went to college with Veronica,” she explains, tugging her hand back from him.

 

“Very nice to meet you,” Danny says, dragging his eyes over her with interest. “So, are you gonna tell me?”

 

Betty frowns. “What?”

 

“Who you are.” He laughs and puts a hand on her shoulder briefly. “Are you gonna tell me who you’re dressed as?”

 

“Oh.” Betty feels her cheeks flush with embarrassment. “Um. Do you watch _Game of Thrones?_ I’m Daenerys Targaryen. The girl with the dragons.”

 

Danny looks confused for a moment, then his eyes light up and he snaps his fingers. “The hot naked chick!” he exclaims, a description that makes Betty wrinkle her nose. He drops his hand to her upper arm and steps forward again, crowding her personal space. “You should’ve come that way instead.”

 

Betty takes a step back. “Yeah, I don’t think so,” she says. As unused as she is to guys hitting on her, it does happen sometimes, and she’s always been bad at shutting them down. She shrugs her shoulder a little to make his hand fall from her arm and grips her drink tighter, trying to think of a polite way to tell him she’s not interested.

 

Meanwhile, this Danny guy seems to be unable to take a hint, and is still talking. “You’re quite beautiful,” he tells her, flicking his eyes to the bit of cleavage exposed by her top and then back to her face. “Has anyone ever told you that you have gorgeous lips?”

 

“Um, no.” Betty can feel her anxiety rising in her chest. This is the exact sort of situation that she tries to avoid. She takes a deep breath and says, “Hey, I have to go for a second, sorry,” then steps away before Danny has a chance to reply. She takes a few quick steps toward the stairs to the second level, hoping to hide out by Veronica’s bedroom, but a flash of dark red near the door catches her eye.

 

It’s Jughead, slipping quietly into the loft. He’s dressed in what Betty guesses is his valet uniform, albeit sloppily - his red vest is open, and the white shirt underneath has a couple of the top buttons undone as well. His ever-present beanie is on top of his head, but it’s slipping backward a little and some of his hair has fallen into his eyes. Betty exhales and strides toward him as he reaches up to fix his hat.

 

“Hi,” she says with a relieved smile, grabbing his forearm. “Please hang out with me.”

 

He glances at her curiously, taking a second to appraise her outfit. “Is that an order, khaleesi?”

 

Betty giggles. “Yes.” She bites her lip. “Let me guess your costume: overworked grad student just off a shift as a valet?”

 

“Right in one.” Jughead looks past her toward the main part of Veronica’s loft. “Lots of people, huh? Veronica did pretty good.”

 

Betty follows his gaze. “Yeah. Veronica knows how to throw a party.” She looks back at Jughead. “I’m glad you’re here. I don’t know anybody.”

 

“I can see a few people that I know, but none of them are really anyone I want to talk to.” Jughead turns back to Betty, and the next thing she knows he’s pulling her into a brief hug. “You look amazing, by the way. I love the costume.”

 

“Thanks! I was a little nervous to wear it,” she confesses, glancing down at herself for a moment before casting her gaze back out toward the living room. Veronica and Archie are setting up a beer pong table, and even though Betty isn’t seventeen anymore and this is not a friend’s basement, she figures that she should take part in at least one game. She has extravagant plans to leave early and go to bed, and she knows that if she partakes in some of Veronica’s planned activities, her friend won’t object too harshly when she inevitably slips out.

 

Jughead seems to be on her wavelength, because he nods his head toward it and says, “Shall we get it over with?”

 

Betty smiles up at him and nods, threading her arm through his as they make their way over. She walks past Danny without acknowledging him, but Betty can feel his gaze following her and Jughead anyway. She ignores it and leans a little closer to Jughead, who miraculously doesn’t seem to be questioning her proximity. On the contrary: he drapes his arm around her shoulders casually and leaves it there while they speak to Archie to propose a game.

 

It feels like the most natural thing in the world, standing here like they’re more than just friendly neighbours, and when her stomach gives a little flip at his touch Betty realizes, maybe they _are_ more.

 

She lets her mind slip back into the moment. “Ronnie and I will play you guys, but you’re going down, Jones,” Archie is saying, to which Jughead rolls his eyes with apparent confidence.

 

They start playing, and ping pong balls start getting tossed to either side of the crude line of tape that Veronica has placed across the centre of the table. All at once, Betty realizes why Jughead had been so unfazed by Archie’s challenge: he has incredible aim. Betty’s pretty sure the only reason that the game isn’t over in five minutes is because she’s terrible at it. She misses nearly every shot she takes except the fourth one, which lands in one of Veronica’s cups with a quiet _plop._

 

“Yay!” Betty celebrates, clapping for herself. “Finally got one.”

 

“Nice job, Betts.” Jughead high-fives her, watches Archie miss a shot, and then proceeds to demolish him and Veronica in three straight shots. The small crowd that has assembled to watch cheers for their victory, to which Jughead flashes a half-smile and lifts a hand in a lazy wave. “Thanks, folks.”

 

Betty intends to back away now so that others can play, but before she can take a step, two more people appear to challenge them. One Betty recognizes as Archie’s friend Reggie, and the other introduces herself as his girlfriend, Josie. Betty gives Jughead an apologetic look, but he just shrugs and sets up their cups again. They beat Reggie and Josie fairly easily, then ultimately lose to Danny and his friend, who definitely look like the kind of people with lots of practice playing beer pong. As they’re walking away, Danny catches Betty’s wrist, and she stops.

 

“No hard feelings, Betty,” he says with a soft wink. “I’d still love to get your number, though. Could give you some pointers for next time.”

 

Betty tugs her wrist out of his grasp and reaches behind her for Jughead’s hand, which she grasps tightly. “No thanks,” she says with all the politeness she can muster. “I’m not interested.” She leans pointedly into Jughead and then leads him away from the table, looking forward to being done with drinking games. It’s already ruined her plans to have one drink all night, and partly because of it she’s had to use Jughead as a shield, which she knows isn’t fair to him.

 

She pulls him toward the expansive window, where the twinkling lights of Boston at night are set out before them. Betty drops his hand and wrings hers immediately, fighting the urge to set her fingernails into their berth on her palms.

 

“I’m sorry,” she says once she’s sat down on the edge of an ottoman, still fidgeting.

 

Jughead tilts his head curiously and sits beside her. “For what?”

 

Betty bites her lower lip and drops her head for a moment, letting the heaviness of her hair and the rush of blood to her forehead weigh her down. “For implying something between us to that guy.”

 

His hand comes to rest on her upper back, his palm hot and wide on her skin. “That’s okay,” he says automatically. “I didn’t - I don’t - uh--” He clears his throat. “Who is he?”

 

Betty lifts her head and shrugs a little. “A friend of some guy Veronica knows from work, I think. He was hitting on me earlier and wasn’t taking the hints that I wasn’t interested. I know I should’ve been an adult and dealt with it better, but you were right there and giving him a more concrete reason to accept ‘no’ for an answer seemed like the easiest way out.” She turns her head to see his face. “Go ahead, judge me, I know I’m like, thirteen.”

 

Jughead frowns and shakes his head. “No, you’re not,” he says. “It’s fucking annoying that dudes like that exist and that one of them is here for some reason. He shouldn’t need a reason like the existence of another guy before he quits.” His hand tenses, then falls slightly to her lower back and around to her side. “But for the record, I don’t mind the implication at all,” he adds, squeezing her waist.

 

Betty exhales a deep breath of relief and feels her cheeks heat up. He’s looking at her with slight nervousness in his eyes, but at the same time there’s a little happy smile on his face. God, she hopes that’s for her. “Good,” she says, shifting her hips so she scoots closer to him. “It’s late. There are no more kids coming. Want to go raid the leftover candy?”

 

Jughead’s eyes are twinkling now. “Oh Betty,” he says, the smile spreading to a grin. “I thought you’d never ask.”

  


They spend the next hour eating snack-size packets of fuzzy peaches and sour patch kids, then share an Uber back to their apartment building around midnight. The party will go on for a while still at Veronica’s, Betty is sure, but she was pretty done with it less than an hour after arriving and at this point she really just wants to take off her itchy costume. So she bids farewell to Veronica and Archie, grabs her bag from upstairs, and heads out.

 

Jughead accompanies her, citing his long day and general distaste for forced interaction and uncomfortable social situations, but Betty honestly really doesn’t care much about his reason. She’s just glad he’s here, because it’s not late enough that he’ll actually want to go to sleep and she’s hoping that he’ll be up for joining her in a de-stressing movie. As they climb the stairs to the fifth floor, Betty tries to figure out how to ask him to hang out in a way that doesn’t make it seem like a booty call, knowing that the phrase “hey, wanna watch Netflix?” after midnight is rarely innocent. Not that she’s opposed to that, necessarily - but for now, that’s not her intention.

 

It’s not until Jughead has unlocked his apartment door and is nearly through it that Betty turns and quickly asks, “Are you going to be up for awhile still?”

 

He looks over at her curiously. “Yeah, probably.”

 

“Do you want to watch a movie?” she blurts out.

 

A smile stretches across Jughead’s face. “Yeah, sure. We can do it over here if you want. I’m pretty sure Archie’s gonna be staying over at Veronica’s.”

 

Betty exhales quiet relief, feeling her nerves subside, and nods. “Okay. I’ll just go change and then I’ll come over.”

 

“Sounds good. I’ll try to rustle up some snacks.” Jughead gives her a mock salute and then disappears into his apartment.

 

Betty bites her lip against a smile and slips into her own unit, closing the door behind herself and making a beeline for the bedroom. She disrobes, and before she gets dressed again she spends five minutes scratching her ribs to satisfy the itch caused by the rub of her cropped leather Daenerys top. After, she tugs on a pair of dark grey leggings and thick wool socks, then spends an unnecessary amount of time trying to pick a shirt to wear. She eventually decides on an oversized cream-coloured sweater in a chunky knit material, grabs her keys and phone, and tiptoes across the hall in her socks.

 

Jughead opens the door almost immediately after her short knock. Betty notices he’s changed out of his valet uniform; now he’s in a pair of old jeans and a dark blue t-shirt. It somehow makes him look really tanned, and Betty spends a few moments marvelling at the even golden hue of his skin before he ushers her into the living room.

 

She sits on the couch and looks around thoughtfully. She’s been in their apartment before, but not particularly for any real length of time, and this is really her first opportunity to let it all sink in. It’s decorated somewhat haphazardly, with just a couple of movie posters on the wall above the huge stack of video games that he and Archie have. It’s clean insofar as it’s not really dusty or anything, but it’s kind of messy. Betty isn’t shocked, figuring that two guys have better things to do than spend their time organizing their belongings, and takes a bit of comfort in the predictability of it all.

 

“It’s not technically Halloween anymore, but I’ve narrowed down our choices to a couple of the best horror-slash-thrillers of the eighties,” Jughead announces, appearing from the kitchen with a bowl of chips in hand and plopping down beside Betty somewhat unceremoniously. “Since you’re the guest, the choice is yours.”

 

Betty smiles at his eager expression and folds her hands on her lap. “Okay, shoot.”

 

“Okay, behind door number one - _The Shining._ Total classic. One of Kubrick’s best, featuring the slow devolution of Jack Nicholson into madness.” Jughead quirks an eyebrow and slides the TV cursor to his next choice. “Second option is _The Thing._ My favourite thing about it is effects - terrible by today’s standards, but still super gross. ‘We found something in the ice’!” he quotes, releasing an excited grin. “So, which is it?”

 

Betty laughs a little. “Well first, excellent choices. Second, your enthusiasm is just plain adorable.” She reaches out and taps Jughead on the nose. He wrinkles it, looking slightly confused, and she adds, “But I pick _The Shining._ I can’t pass up creepy twins.”

 

“Good decision.” Jughead gets up and flicks the lights off, then returns to Betty’s side. “You need anything before I press play?”

 

She shakes her head. “Nope, I’m all set.”

 

“Okay.” He hits a button on the remote and then settles back into the couch as the opening scene with the winding mountain road begins. “You’ve seen it before?”

 

“Once, a long time ago. Obviously you have too, I’m guessing?”

 

Jughead nods. “I used to work at the drive-in theatre in Riverdale,” he explains. “It was one of my favourite movies to play.”

 

Betty tucks her feet underneath herself leans her knees toward Jughead so she can more easily glance between him and the TV. “Ooh, the drive-in, huh? I bet you got lots of girls back in the booth.”

 

He looks at her with a raised eyebrow. “Do I look like the kind of guy that got lots of girls anywhere, let alone in my projection booth?”

 

“Yeah,” Betty says honestly, giving a small shrug. She edges a little closer to Jughead until their arms are touching. “Besides the fact that you’re good-looking, you obviously know a lot about movies. I think a lot of girls would be into that. I could see that working for you.”

 

“Well, thanks for the vote of confidence in past-me,” Jughead chuckles, “but no, I wasn’t some kind of cinephile-slash-ladies man. All the girls in Riverdale were more into guys like Archie - football quarterback, letterman jacket, that kind of thing.”

 

Betty bites her lip. “No offense to Archie, but isn’t that a little stereotypical?”

 

“Sorry, weren’t you a high-school cheerleader?” Jughead asks, turning and tilting his head at her.

 

The corner of his mouth pulls teasingly. “Shut up,” she says with a smile, reaching over and tickling his side in retaliation. To her surprise, he turns out to be quite ticklish, and after ignoring a warning look from him in favour of continuing her assault, he half-tackles her. She giggles, squirming to release herself, but his grip is too strong and she winds up laying face down across his lap, legs and arms immobilized. Betty gives up after a final brief, futile struggle, then cranes her neck to look at his face.

 

He looks triumphant. “Are you ready to concede defeat?”

 

“Fine,” Betty says grumpily, flipping around when he releases her. Her sweater has ridden up, exposing her midriff for the second time tonight. Before she knows what’s even happening, Jughead has slid one hand across her abdomen and around her waist and another underneath her upper back, then lifted and twisted her a bit so that she’s facing the TV again but is still stretched across his lap.

 

“Here,” Jughead offers, voice suddenly a lot quieter. He grabs a couple of throw pillows and stacks them under Betty’s head so that the rise of his leg isn’t uncomfortable against her side. She’s grateful that he can’t see her face, because Betty can feel the heat in her cheeks and she knows that she’s blushing. His right arm is still around her waist, hand splayed across her stomach and ribcage beneath her shirt. The warmth of his skin is nearly overpowering for a few moments, then Betty takes a slow breath to calm her heartbeat and that feeling subsides.

 

“Thanks,” Betty whispers, putting her hand on his forearm. She leans backward a bit until her shoulders hit his abdomen, then twists her neck again to smile at him.

 

He’s already looking down at her. He’s not quite smiling but his eyes are happy, with glints of what Betty thinks is nervousness. “You comfortable?” he asks.

 

“Yeah,” she breathes, extending one of her bent knees and stretching her leg out. Betty turns back to the TV and focuses on the movie, trying not to let his presence distract her.

 

It’s easier said than done. Jughead is remarkably warm despite the cooling season and the late hour, and he smells good. The movie, while well made and entertaining, is no match for the slow rub of his thumb on her ribcage. She’s not quite sure what exactly is happening - or starting to happen - between them, but it’s definitely gone past simple “neighbourly” behaviour. But oh well, she thinks: some people borrow a cup of sugar, Betty borrows body heat and smooth skin.

 

At some point, Jughead’s free hand starts to comb her hair back from the right side of her face. His fingers slide through, freeing any slight knots that may have developed over the course of the evening. It feels so good, the roots of her hair easing and massaging themselves into submission. She remembers how she and Polly used to braid each other's hair; that was the same sensation. It feels safe, like remnants of a home and a time long since passed by.

 

Betty eats a couple of chips, but by and large Jughead is the one to polish off the bowl. She's been increasingly amazed by his seemingly bottomless stomach and ravenous appetite - it wasn't really consistent with his lean physique, and she's curious for his secret.

 

“Metabolism,” he tells her upon asking. “It'll fail me one day. And I do work out, sometimes.”

 

Betty settles back into him again. “Jealous.”

 

Jughead's hand moves down to rest directly on her abdomen. “You're beautiful, Betty,” he tells her, his voice full of warning. “And I'm not just saying that to say it. You are.”

 

“Thanks,” she says softly, squeezing his fingers and dragging his hand up to her decidedly less soft ribcage anyway. Betty closes her eyes for a long moment, focusing on the heaviness of her sweater on top of his arm. “Juggie?”

 

“Yeah?”

 

“The valet uniform actually looks good on you.”

 

Jughead chuckles softly. “Thanks, Betts.” His hand slides beneath the side of Betty’s cheek, and a second later she feels her head lift just enough for him to press his lips to her hair.

 

Betty has to suppress an actual giggle, and a small part of her hates herself for it. “Y’know, I like this building a lot,” she says conversationally. “It's decently close to school, there's that little gym, and the neighbourhood is pretty.”

 

“You're forgetting something else.”

 

She turns her head slightly. “What's that?”

 

Jughead grins. “Great neighbours.”

 

Betty rolls her eyes but smiles at him anyway. “You're ridiculous. I never insinuated anything about good neighbours.” She bites her lip and stares at the movie for a second. “But I mean, I definitely prefer living here than the Overlook. And the maintenance guy is a lot less murdery than Jack Torrance.”

  
“Gotta cherish those small victories,” Jughead tells her, and as his hand squeezes her waist, Betty thinks, _yeah._

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You guys are the best. You keep me young. 
> 
> Please leave some more love if you liked this!


	6. six

_Hate is a lot like love. It’s warm and fills you up until every part of you is tingling to release it._

  * Heather Demetrios



  


It’s mid-November and the chilliness of mid-autumn has settled over Boston. There are still some leaves on the trees, but for the most part they have fallen to join their brethren in the fiery kaleidoscope of colour that blankets the ground. The air is a little cooler now, and the wind bites more crisply during Jughead’s walks to the T. Girls have started to wear the unnecessarily gigantic knitted scarves that Jughead doesn’t understand. For his part, he’s broken out his sherpa denim and the rest of his (rather impressive, if he does say so himself) fleece-lined jacket collection, so it must be officially “cold outside”.

 

Mid-November has also brought the minor relief of that period between when assignments are due and when exams begin. In Jughead’s MFA, there aren’t really final exams so much as there are just even more assignments and greater expectations for the completion of his major project, but even then the load has lightened a little.

 

So on this Sunday morning, when the world outside seems vaguely frosty and he has a few hours of spare time, Jughead is playing video games. He’s always been a fairly big proponent of escapism, and when it comes to wasting a couple of hours (and he doesn’t feel like spending the energy on reading), video games are an excellent outlet. Besides, Archie is needlessly competitive, and sometimes Jughead loves poking the bear.

 

Today, Archie is wearing tattered gym shorts and an old Riverdale High t-shirt, and he hasn’t shaved yet. “Hey bro, by the way,” he says from the couch beside Jughead, both of their eyes focused on the TV, “the girls might come over later.”

 

 _The girls._ Jughead isn’t quite sure when he and Archie became so closely associated with two people that could be collectively referred to as the plural of their most basic shared characteristic. Archie has had lots of girlfriends over the years, and many of them have had friends that have hung out at the apartment on occasion, which has resulted in that girl and Jughead both playing a strange sort of third-and-fourth wheel role. And despite some of Archie’s girlfriends’ attempts to force a relationship, Jughead never made a connection with any of the friends, romantic or otherwise.

 

Until Betty.

 

“Okay,” Jughead says, keeping his voice neutral. “How are things going with Veronica, anyway?”

 

“Great,” Archie says enthusiastically. “She’s awesome, Jug, I really like her. A lot more than any girl in a long time.” He lets out a _whoop_ when he kills Jughead on-screen, then advances to the next level. “What about Betty? You guys were like, glued at the hip on Halloween.”

 

Jughead shrugs in what he hopes is a nonchalant manner. “Neither of us knew a lot of people there,” he says by way of explanation. “But yeah, I guess we’re starting to be friends.”

 

“Come on, Jug, I’m not blind.” Archie sends his elbow jutting into Jughead’s side, then swears loudly when his character dies. He sets the controller down and runs a hand through his hair. “God damn this game. Anyway. Veronica thinks Betty has a thing for you, so you should go for it.”

 

Jughead gives Archie a pointed look. “Restart the game,” he says flatly. When Archie obeys and turns back to the TV, he adds, “She _is_ awesome. And yeah, I like her, and sometimes I get a bit of a vibe that maybe she - I dunno. That maybe she thinks I’m not the worst to have around. But girls like her don’t date guys like me.”

 

“Why not?”

 

“She’s just--” Jughead begins to answer, but stops when his cell buzzes on the coffee table. He glances down and sees the Instagram icon in the corner of the screen, then immediately pauses the video game. “One sec Arch, it’s Jellybean.”

 

Jughead hates Instagram. He hates Facebook and Snapchat and Twitter and pretty much all social media, but he has Instagram solely because of Jellybean. Their mother has never exactly had the most stable financial situation, so Jellybean has the tendency to get a new pre-paid cell phone number every few months or so. After a couple of months went by where Jughead was completely unable to contact his sister, she’d forced him to get Instagram so that they could at least private message through the app in emergency situations. That had eventually turned into them relying more heavily on the app, and at this point Jughead is pretty sure that 99 per cent of their texts are sent through Instagram.

 

**_Hey Jug. Bad news. Mom has been a little manic lately and she freaked out yesterday, and I guess we’re not having Thanksgiving anymore. I’m going to Marie’s instead I think. I’m sorry. I miss you :(_ **

 

For a moment, Jughead’s mind goes blank. In the next breath, in rushes the emotions: anger, sadness, frustration. Thanksgiving is the one time of year that he is guaranteed to see Jellybean. In some years, it’s the _only_ time he sees her; between paying for tuition, rent, food, and books, he hasn’t always had the extra cash to go to Toledo more than the one annual trip. He’s sure as hell not going to Toledo if Jellybean isn’t going to be around - even on good years, he makes every effort to limit the required interaction with their mother. It’s a price he’ll only pay for Jellybean.

 

“Fuck,” Jughead mutters to himself, standing up. “I need to go get some air.” He walks to the door without waiting for Archie’s response and immediately thunders down the stairwell to street level.

 

He walks out the lobby doors on autopilot, wandering with his brain elsewhere until he finds a bench in the small park a few blocks from his building. Jughead drops his head into his hands and breathes through his nose, trying to calm down. He doesn’t want to let his mother get to him, but he knows that _Mom has been a little manic lately_ is code for _Mom stopped taking her meds_ and it kills him that this woman can’t do the simplest thing for the sake of her children. Or more accurately, for the sake of Jellybean, because he’s not one of his mother’s priorities and he knows that that’s always been the case.

 

The best that Jughead can hope for now is that he can find some time after Christmas to make it down to Toledo to see his sister. They’re not even that close anymore, but he has been trying to change that; he feels like she’s been slipping further and further under their mother’s influence, and the last thing Jughead wants is another Jones woman turning against him.

 

 _He’s so much like his father, that boy,_ his mother always says; and since his father is currently rotting in a prison in upstate New York, Jughead knows it’s not a compliment.

 

Jughead’s not quite sure how long he sits on the bench for, but his hands aren’t too cold when he finally lifts his head so he imagines it hasn’t been more than twenty minutes. His cell phone is in his pocket and has been buzzing, but a cursory glance tells him it’s just texts from Archie, so he ignores it. Jughead spreads his arms across the back of the bench and drops his head backwards so that he’s staring at the sky through the half-empty branches above him.

 

“Looking for inspiration?”

 

His head snaps down at the familiar voice. His eyes take a delayed half-second to find Betty, but when they focus on her he has to take a second glance. She’s clearly dressed for a run, so although it’s fall and she’s warmly outfitted, it’s still activewear. Which means skintight leggings and a long-sleeved shirt, all black - which means the temporary pause of Jughead’s brain function. She has an earbud in one hand, but the cheerful smile on her face begins to fade to a look of concern with every additional moment that he stares at her without answering.

 

“What’s wrong?” Betty asks, sitting down beside him.

 

Jughead opens his mouth to reply, but nothing comes out. He realizes that he doesn’t have any words for this whole stupid situation - not yet - so he closes his mouth without making a sound. He shakes his head instead and drops his gaze to the ground. He’s told her all about his family, and he wants to tell her about this too, but the familiar ache of disappointment is too strong for him to be reasonably eloquent about it yet. He half-expects Betty to get up and continue on her run, but when she doesn’t move he realizes he’s underestimated her. Her hand slides up his spine slowly and he feels his eyelids close. She slowly begins to rub his back in soothing circles. He lets his hand fall to her leg, which he squeezes gratefully.

 

Betty drops her chin to the back of his shoulder and they sit in silence for at least another fifteen minutes. Now, Jughead _is_ cold, and he figures he’s left Archie panicking for long enough, so he forces his head up. Still avoiding her eyes, he quietly says to the concrete, “You kinda look like a ninja.”

 

Betty laughs softly beside him. It sounds like music, he thinks. “My secondary career,” she says. “Do you want waffles?”

 

Jughead turns his head to meet her eyes. Her look of concern is now tinged with a vaguely hopeful turn in the corner of her lips.  It makes him smile despite his mood, and he replies, “Yeah.”

  


They’re at her apartment in ten minutes. Jughead replies to Archie with a quick **_I’m okay man, shit with my mom, just taking a breather_ ** _,_ then stands awkwardly in the middle of Betty’s kitchen as he waits for her to change out of her running gear. She has a couple of cheerful magnets on her fridge with phrases like _‘Today is a good day to have a good day!’_ and _‘You got this’,_ which make him both cringe and smile. They’re cute and overly idealistic in a decidedly un-Betty way, which makes him think they were gifts rather than self-selected.

 

“So, regular or blueberry waffles?” Betty asks, tightening her ponytail as she walks out of her bedroom.

 

Jughead takes a second to appraise her for the second time today. She’s in leggings again, but this time they’re light grey. Her dusty blue sweater looks warm, but when she passes by him he can see that it separates and wraps together in the middle of her back. Instead of answering her question, he blurts, “How many pairs of leggings do you _own?”_

 

Betty turns and sticks her middle finger up at him, an affectionate smile on her face. “It’s fall, we’re in New England, come on. I’m a token white girl. It’s basically my duty.”

 

“Uh huh.” Jughead scratches his chin. “And regular is fine, by the way.”

 

“Okay.” She smiles again and turns away from him to face the counter. For a few seconds Jughead contemplates inviting Archie over to join them - after all, he’s probably just eating cereal in their apartment, ten feet away - but he decides against it, realizing that some one-on-one time with Betty might just be the thing he needs to lift his mood.

 

Plus, she’s reaching for different ingredients and moving around, and it’s really difficult not to stare at her ass. He’s trying, he _is -_ but between the way her sweater ties up and the inches of exposed pale skin on her lower back, it’s basically framed for display. The last thing Jughead needs is Archie taking note of his inability to quit ogling Betty and telling Veronica about it. He’s definitely not an expert in the romance department, but he doesn’t get the sense that pressure from her best friend would be any kind of a helpful factor in whether or not Betty would ever want to go on a date with him.

 

Once the batter is mixed and poured into the iron, the waffles themselves take a surprisingly short amount of time to cook. Jughead can’t actually recall ever using a waffle iron or eating waffles that were made from one, but he’s pretty sure that he’s had some non-Eggo types in his life. As he’s thinking about it, he watches Betty create a pile of about eight. Once she has that, she sets the iron aside and brings them to the kitchen table. She fetches a bottle of maple syrup from the fridge and a can of whipped cream, then sits down in a chair and gestures for Jughead to do the same.

 

He loads one up with syrup and whipped cream, then cuts a piece off and shoves it in his mouth somewhat unceremoniously. “This is so good, Betty,” he mumbles, mouth half-full.

 

Betty smiles at him warmly. “Thanks,” she replies, the politeness in her tone seeming to kick in automatically. She prepares her own waffle - less syrup than him, and no whipped cream - and cuts a delicate piece off. “This is the picture of health,” she jokes, “I cut my run short to go eat waffles. I think my ass is getting fat in New England.”

 

Jughead stops chewing for a moment and raises an eyebrow. He realizes she’s being intentionally self-deprecating, but that’s among the most ridiculous things he’s ever heard. He likes to head off people’s expectations too, mainly as a defense mechanism, but she’d called him on it weeks ago and it’s his turn. He swallows the bits of waffle in his mouth and is about to tell her she’s not allowed to be self-deprecating if he’s not allowed to be, but then her eyes pass somewhat anxiously back to her plate and he can tell in their nervous glint that she fucking believes it.

 

“You do _not_ have a fat ass,” he blurts out unceremoniously, setting his fork down with a loud _clink._ (He should know; he’s just spent ten minutes staring at it). Betty looks at him with what seems like mild amusement at his outburst, and he adds, “I mean, it’s not flat either, that’s not - that’s not what I … what’s the societal ideal now? Is Jennifer Lopez still a thing? Either way, uh - jesus, hang on.” Jughead lifts a hand to his neck and rubs it awkwardly. “Okay. It’s not fat, but it’s still nice and, um - it’s perfect. It looks really nice. I’m going to stop talking now.” He exhales in a short puff, and has never before felt so much like he was dying. “I did that wrong. Can we forget this ever happened?”

 

Betty bites her lip, an obvious and futile attempt to stem the growth of the delighted smile that crosses her face. She gets out of her chair and walks to Jughead’s side of the table, which prompts only mild fear in him, then leans down. “I think you did that perfectly,” she says, kissing his cheek. “You’re a sweetheart.”

 

She sits back down and finishes her waffle, then takes her empty plate over to the sink and begins to clean the waffle iron. Jughead is glad that her back is turned, because he’s got a stupid smile on his face and it would probably ruin his old vibe if somebody were to see him looking so cheesy. Too many silent moments have passed for him to directly respond to her, so instead he says, “These are really good waffles,” and shoves another forkful in his mouth.

 

Betty looks over her shoulder at him and winks. “Uh huh,” she says, and then - he must be seeing things, because Betty would never. He blinks, and _yes,_ she is. He swallows, confused, but can’t bring himself to look away. She’s wiggling her hips so that her ass shakes at him little. The fine muscles of her lower back flex delicately as she does so, and he’s entranced. Jughead’s eyes finally tear away from her posterior to focus on her face, and that’s when he sees that she’s blushing a little.

 

“Tease,” he comments with his own cheeks blazing, tilting his head down and looking at her through brooding eyebrows. Her response is a quiet giggle as she turns back to the sink to scrub at the plates of the waffle iron.

 

Jughead's phone buzzes in his pocket again. He slips it out, assuming it'll be another message from Archie, and is surprised when it's another Instagram notification from his sister. He swallows and clicks it.

 

 **_Maybe after Christmas I can come up there for the weekend,_ ** Jellybean has typed, **_I miss you._ ** Jughead breathes out into a smile and replies, **_fuck yes, you're welcome anytime, JB_ ** _._

 

“Good news?”

 

Jughead lifts his head to look at Betty. He realizes two seconds into analyzing her curious expression that he'd been smiling at his phone like the Cheshire cat, and clears his throat to try to maintain some shred of his brooding aesthetic. “My sister might come up and visit after Christmas,” he tells her. “I go down to Toledo every year for Thanksgiving, that's when I usually get to see her. But my mom cancelled it this year - that's why I was upset earlier, when you found me.”

 

Betty sinks into a chair next to him and puts a soft hand on his. “I'm so sorry, Juggie.”

 

“Thanks,” he says, meeting her eyes. “I’m sure I can go home with Archie with his dad’s instead. That’s where I go for Christmas anyway. I’d just been looking forward to seeing Jellybean. I haven’t seen her since _last_ Thanksgiving.” He bites his lower lip and glances down at his phone when it buzzes again. **_I’d rather hang out without Mom around anyway, plus Boston sounds cool,_ ** his sister has added, which makes him smile. “But if I can help her come visit here after the holidays, that would make up for it.”

 

Betty’s smile is so wide that he’s afraid her face might split. “That’s so great!” she says, squeezing his hand. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do. I really hope she gets to come up and visit. It’s not fair that you don’t get to see your sister that often.”

 

Jughead watches her eyes cast downward slightly. He can tell that she’s genuinely happy for him, but there’s some sadness accompanying it. Sure, his sister lives in another state, but her sister is gone permanently. He swallows and mentally counts himself lucky that at least Jellybean is still around for him to miss. “Jellybean will like you a lot,” he tells Betty, whose gaze lifts again.

 

“Yeah?”

 

He nods. “You’d like her too. She’s kind of a sarcastic brat sometimes, but--”

 

“I’m so surprised by that,” Betty jokes with a pointed look.

 

Jughead’s jaw drops open. “I am _not--”_

 

“No, you’re right,” Betty says, her voice full of a teasingly fake apology, “you’re sunshine and rainbows.”

 

He rolls his eyes at her but gives her a half-grin. “And don’t forget it,” he says, standing up. “I should probably head back. Archie’s gotta be wondering where the hell I went.” He dusts his hands off on his jeans and walks toward the door, stopping when he’s reached it. “Thanks for breakfast, Betty.”

 

She goes up to him, her socked feet sliding on the laminate. “My pleasure,” she says, opening her arms for a hug.

 

Jughead obliges, letting Betty’s hands slip over his shoulders and wrapping his own arms around her. He slips his left hand into the part at the back of her sweater and curls his fingers around her waist, then drops his face to her head and breathes into her hair slowly. She’s so fucking warm, her skin is so soft, and now that she’s so close to him he doesn’t feel much like letting go. Her cheek is flat against his collarbone, their hips pressed together slightly, and she’s started to scratch lightly at his upper back over his t-shirt. He tightens his grip, not wanting her to let go, and to his relief Betty just nuzzles in closer.

 

Finally, he loosens his arms a little and she leans back from him slightly. One of her hands slides up his shoulder, around the side of his head and down to his jaw. “You give really good hugs,” she tells him in a soft voice, then leans in and kisses his cheek again before pulling away.

 

Jughead’s head is swirling, but his body is mourning the loss of hers against it. “Available anytime,” he jokes, dropping his hand to the doorknob and turning it. “See you later?”

 

She nods and stands in the doorway, watching as he walks across to his own unit, unlocks the door, and slips through. He winks at her before closing the door and is rewarded with a little smile.

 

\--

 

Jughead spends the rest of the day alternating playing video games with writing. Despite his distracting morning, he accomplishes a fair bit, and heads down to the gym for a run around six o’clock. He’s been on the treadmill for about half an hour when a text from Archie interrupts the music his phone is playing. Jughead swipes his thumb over it to read while he runs.

 

**_V just got here and B is coming at 7:15. I can smell something delicious coming from her apartment. If it’s not for us see if she’ll bring it anyway._ **

 

Jughead raises an eyebrow at the message. He slows his pace to a slow jog and finally to a walk, screenshots Archie’s text, and sends it to Betty with the caption **_Arch has demands._ ** He finishes his last mile, then hops off the treadmill, wipes it down, and makes his way over to the stairwell.

 

He trudges up the steps slowly because the muscles in his legs have apparently decided to protest the new incline. Betty’s response comes somewhere between the second and third floors; it’s the raised-eyebrow emoji, accompanied by a simple **_just Arch?_ ** The reply makes him laugh, and he quickly types **_am I that predictable_ ** back to her as he reaches the third floor landing.

 

 **_I might need something in exchange,_ ** her next message says, and Jughead swallows at the mess of implication that is running through his mind. He’s sure that she doesn’t mean anything dirty, but _god,_ her wish is his command. In an attempt to be normal, he replies with, **_I don’t have Tom Hardy’s phone number, sorry,_ ** then slides his phone in his pocket and runs up the rest of the flights to the fifth floor.

 

Veronica and Archie are on the couch when he opens the door, sweat dripping from his hair. Or rather - Archie is on the couch, and Veronica is on Archie. Jughead wrinkles his nose at the two of them and says, “Dude, come on.”

 

“Hi Jughead!” Veronica chirps, dragging her mouth away from Archie’s neck. “You look … sweaty.”

 

“I hadn’t noticed,” he says wryly. “Gonna hop in the shower. Don’t have sex on the couch. It’s hard to clean.”

 

“Noted,” Veronica smirks, turning away.

 

Jughead rolls his eyes at them and walks straight into the bathroom. He takes his phone out of his pocket and clicks on the waiting text from Betty, smiling as he reads it. **_Damn. I had heard his hugs were as good as yours and everything._ **

 

 **_Like being embraced by a cloud,_ ** he replies quickly, **_but I guess I’m the best you’ve got._ ** Jughead disrobes and looks at himself in the mirror for a moment. Not Archie levels of muscular but fairly decent, he thinks. He’s always been somewhat of a lanky stringbean, more Gumby than Pokey, but over the last few years he’s managed to develop a layer of definition that even Archie had complimented him on. Jughead decides to check his phone one last time before he steps under the water and is glad to see that Betty has responded. She’s sent two messages: one is a simple happy-face, and the second says **_I’ll make do!_ **

 

He smiles at his phone and decides not to reply, noting that it’s 7:00 and she’s supposed to be coming over right away. He hops in the shower and tries not to think too hard about how nice it had felt to have in his arms, focusing instead on cleaning himself and washing his ridiculous head of hair (constantly unruly; and people wondered why he was always wearing a beanie). Jughead steps out with five minutes to spare, towel-dries his hair, and wraps the towel around his waist. He grabs his phone in his hand and wads his dirty clothes in a ball under the other arm, then steps out of the bathroom.

 

He freezes. Betty is standing at the end of the hallway, at the juncture of the living room and kitchen, facing away from him. His eyes widen - yeah, there’s the towel, but he’s fucking _naked -_ and he tries to quietly slip into his bedroom. His attempt at stealth fails, and Betty turns her head toward him. Jughead tries to wipe the panicked expression off his face and forces himself to smile at her.

 

“Uh, hey,” he says, reaching up to his neck with the hand that’s holding his phone and scratching it uncomfortably. “You’re early.”

 

She doesn’t respond. For a moment he’s confused, but then he sees her eyes travelling down from his face to his body. They stop to focus on his chest and the slight abs that he knows are visible mostly because he’d just worked out and is a little dehydrated. Jughead can’t help the smirk that comes onto his face, especially when Betty’s gaze moves southward as though out of her control. Her cheeks suddenly turn bright red as she seems to realize what she’s doing, and he fixes her with an amused look.

 

“I think you’re supposed to give me a one-dollar bill,” he says, winking.

 

A hand flies to Betty’s mouth and she quickly turns away without a word. Jughead laughs and walks into his bedroom, suddenly feeling a lot more confident.

 

As it turns out, she _has_ brought snacks - homemade zucchini chips, crescent pepperoni roll-ups, and a giant bowl of popcorn with what smells like parmesan and rosemary on top. Jughead takes a handful and shoves it in his mouth, noting Betty’s sudden shyness around him. She carries her snacks to the coffee table and places them in front of Veronica and Archie, who are thankfully too wrapped up in each other to take note of the newly awkward dynamic between their friends. Betty walks back to the kitchen to grab the zucchini chips, but before she can return to the living room Jughead grabs her wrist.

 

“You okay?” he asks her quietly, his thumb rubbing her skin.

 

Betty blushes again. “Yeah. I didn’t mean to stare before, I just - I didn’t really expect you to be all…”

 

“All what?” Jughead prompts, grinning at her.

 

She glares at him, clearly aware of what he’s doing. “Please tell me again how my ass is not fat but not _not_ fat,” she retorts, putting a hand on her hip.

 

 _Cooper one, Jones zero,_ Jughead thinks, his ears heating up with the memory of their earlier exchange. “Call it even?” he proposes, dropping her wrist from his hand.

 

She makes a display out of pretending to think about it, then smiles and nods at him. “Deal,” she agrees, then turns to grab a few napkins from a pile on the kitchen counter. In a burst of spontaneity, Jughead steps past her and intentionally lets his hand brush against her ass. She whips her head around with a dropped jaw and looks at him with rapidly darkening pink cheeks, her eyes sparkling competitively.

 

“Oops,” he says innocently, shrugging. Jughead reaches over and takes the napkins from her. “I’ll carry those.”

 

Betty’s jaw closes slowly, then her mouth stretches into a soft smile, the tip of her tongue poking out of the corner. He grins back at her before turning away and walking to the dining room, mentally adding a point to his column. He sits on the floor so that Betty can have the armchair, knowing that neither of them will want to have to sit next to Archie and Veronica on the couch. When Betty passes by him on the way to the chair, she grabs his beanie off of his head and shoves it playfully over her own hair.

 

She doesn’t return it until the end of the night, but Jughead doesn’t mind.

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for all the feedback, you guys are really the best! I don't know how happy I am with this chapter, but sometimes you just have to let go I guess :)


	7. seven

_ And my heart will beat for someone who deserves it. _

  * Amy Zhang, Falling Into Place



  
  


“Come on Betty, it’ll be a cute picture. What  _ else  _ are we going to do this afternoon?”

 

Betty sighs as she sits down on the plush office chair that’s pushed into the corner of one of her parents’ spare bedrooms and appraises Cheryl with an uncertain eye. She’s in Vermont for Thanksgiving with her parents, who live on an acreage outside of Montpelier. For most of Betty’s life they’d owned and written for a local newspaper, which she’d spent many summers interning at. Her parents had sold it a couple of years ago as part of some kind of half-assed attempt at a transition toward retirement, at which point they’d moved out of the city and onto eleven beautiful tree-laden acres. They were still writing for the paper, so two of the house’s three expansive bedrooms had been transformed into home offices for each of them.

 

A part of Betty is pretty sure that her parents are just kidding themselves. She hopes they actually do retire one day; they’ve worked really hard all her life, and she thinks it’d be good for them to spend some time together that’s not centered around their kids or work. It would also give them some time to be individuals, to explore their hobbies - for example, her father has always liked tinkering with cars. It’s a passion he’d passed onto Betty, although she doesn’t get much opportunity to do that right now. They’d spend many a late night in the garage, fixing up old cars; in his semi-retirement, her father has taken to fixing up rider lawn mowers and other smaller machinery for various neighbours.  _ He  _ would probably be fine; he’d love retirement, Betty thinks.

 

Her mother is a different story. She’s always busy, always doing something, asking questions, poking holes - a born reporter, endlessly curious. Even if her methods weren’t always something that Betty agreed with, she has to admit that her mother is definitely productive. She has the kind of personality that doesn’t mesh well with boredom and the kind of heart that doesn’t sit idle on sadness. In Betty’s opinion, there’s a distinct possibility that Alice Cooper will never be able to retire, for the sake of her own mental health. Without work to lean into, Betty doesn’t want to know what she’d do to occupy herself; apart from that, as far as Betty knows, her only other hobbies are controlling her children.

 

For the last couple of years, Betty has been making a mental list of things for her mother to pour her energy into. It’s mostly a self-preservation mechanism, because if Alice Cooper can be occupied by something else then it means she’s not texting Betty and calling her and sending her fucking pharmaceutical pamphlets, and that’s all Betty wants: independence from her mother. (She’s not a fucking child anymore. It’s not too much to ask.) For the last little while, home decor and gardening have been near the top of the list, because although their new house is beautiful, it’s pretty sparsely decorated.

 

Not that it really needs it: it’s the very definition of picturesque, a big white house set in the rolling hills and surrounded by giant maple trees. All that’s missing is a picket fence. Then again, the Coopers have always come up a little short of a full deck, despite her parents’ attempts: chasing the dream, with Norman Rockwell just out of reach. 

 

_ “Betty.”  _

 

She looks up at her cousin. “Fine, but you can’t post it anywhere.”

 

Cheryl beams. “Excellent. Now get up.”

 

Betty shakes her head slightly but stands up obediently. Sometimes, it was just easier to indulge Cheryl’s whims than to fight them. It’s a lesson that took Betty years to learn, especially since she and her cousin hadn’t always gotten along as kids and a small part of Betty still has a natural instinct to intentionally disagree with her. In recent years, however, Cheryl had gone through a lot of pain and heartbreak - her father and brother both passed away in short order - and after Polly also died, she and Cheryl grew a lot closer.

 

Cheryl’s family had been - still was, technically - quite wealthy, and when she turned twenty-one she’d inherited quite a bit of money from her father’s estate. That said, she was semi-estranged from her mother and always seemed kind of lonely. It’s a bit of a cautionary tale, Betty thinks: even with all the money in the world, family and friends are everything. Betty’s parents had welcomed her into the fold, so she was here in Vermont to spend Thanksgiving with the Coopers.

 

At the current moment, they’re hanging out in one of the home offices - Alice’s, Betty thinks, based on the strict order of the desktop. Cheryl is sleeping on a rollaway cot in this one, while Betty is a few doors down on an air mattress in her father’s office. They’d been joking around, with Cheryl teasing Betty about her perpetually pastel wardrobe, when Cheryl had proposed the idea of switching outfits for a laugh.

 

So here Betty is, tugging her grey jeans down her hips and replacing them with Cheryl’s skirt. It’s black, leather, and short - nothing that Betty would ever wear in real life. Cheryl puts Betty’s pants on and shimmies around with a smile on her face.

 

“These are really comfy,” she says, pulling at the fabric. They’re just slightly big on her, since Betty has both wider hips and a larger ass than her cousin (story of her life), but don’t gape dramatically. Betty counts that as a win and pulls her lavender sweater off, trading it for Cheryl’s, which is tight, red, and cropped to expose a couple of inches of skin above the skirt.

 

“I look like an idiot,” Betty declares, looking down at herself. “How do you pull this off?!”

 

Cheryl crosses her arms. “Confidence, Betty. Get some.” She reaches over and adjusts the hem of the skirt slightly. “Damn - you need to wear skirts more often. Look at your legs!”

 

Betty dismisses the compliment with a shake of her head. She’s never been less comfortable in an outfit, including the Daenerys Targaryen costume she’d worn on Halloween. She looks longingly at her own clothes, but has to admit that Cheryl can somehow pull them off too. “You look very wholesome,” Betty decides, smiling teasingly.

 

“That’ll never fly in LA,” Cheryl jokes, leaning her cell phone up against a kleenex box. She taps a few long-nailed fingers on the screen and then summons Betty to stand beside her directly across from the device. “Self-timer. Pose, Betty!”

 

She tries to smile, summoning all of her gentle confidence, but is pretty sure that she still looks like a little kid playing dress-up. She rids herself of Cheryl’s clothing as soon as the photo is done and pulls her own shirt and jeans back on quickly.

 

“Perfect,” Cheryl declares, zipping her skirt up and glancing at the photo. “Wanna see? You actually look so hot--”

 

“No,” Betty declines, not willing to expose herself to her own critical eye. “Want to go sit outside? I can’t believe it’s not snowing yet. I’ll make tea.”

 

“Yes, alright.” Cheryl pulls her long curtain of hair over her shoulder. “Herbal. You know I don’t drink black tea.”

 

Betty suppresses the amused laugh that she wants to give. She wonders if anyone else has noticed how much her mother and Cheryl have in common behaviourally. They’re both fairly short-tempered and curt in their responses and neither of them are the kind of person that takes shit from others - at least not laying down. Betty has tried to call upon that quality in herself once or twice, and while it’s been fairly successful she’d still consider herself more of a pacifist in most situations.

 

She goes to the kitchen and brews two cups of peppermint tea, then heads out to the covered porch where Cheryl is already sitting on the cushioned wicker loveseat, a thick blanket covering her legs. Betty hands her both mugs of tea and slips in beside her cousin, burrowing herself under the blanket as well and then taking the steaming mug that Cheryl passes her.

 

“This is horribly idealistic,” Cheryl comments, swishing her teabag around in the hot water to flush the flavour out more quickly.

 

“What do you mean?” Betty asks, letting the heat from the mug warm her hands.

 

Cheryl points out at the yard. “Big house on a few acres, the leaves everywhere, your mom cooking dinner inside.” She sighs dramatically. “We’re getting pretty good at faking happiness.”

 

Betty nods slowly. “Yeah,” she agrees. “I think pretending makes them happy. So I’ll do it for a few days.” Her phone buzzes in her pocket unexpectedly, and Betty slides her hand under the blanket to grab it. She swipes her thumb across and sees a notification from instagram. She raises an eyebrow, momentarily confused, and then freezes. “Cheryl, did you--”

 

“It’s a  _ great  _ picture,” Cheryl chirps, sipping her tea. “You’ll thank me later.”

 

_ “Cheryl.”  _ Betty closes her eyes in embarrassment for a moment before clicking on the tag. There’s the photo, alright, with the caption  **_cousin swap?_ ** _ :  _ Cheryl in classic Cooper attire, herself in Blossom red. Betty can see the discomfort in her own face in the photo, but as her eyes trace further down she pauses her mental panic. Although Cheryl’s skirt is certainly shorter than anything she owns or would regularly wear, Betty has to admit that her legs don’t look totally awful. It’s possible that she is seeing the payoff from her new leg workout - finally something good coming out of the hundreds of lunges she does every week.

 

Still, Betty comments with an embarrassed smiley face emoji and the monkey that’s covering its own eyes, which makes Cheryl’s phone ping. Her cousin takes one look at Betty’s comment and rolls her eyes at her. “You look gorgeous, Betty,” she informs her again. “Cheryl-approved.”

 

Betty shakes her head a little but decides to let it go. Hardly anyone she associated with on a regular basis followed Cheryl on instagram; it was unlikely that anybody would actually see the photo anyway. “Tell me about LA,” she urges instead, wanting desperately to get her anxious mind occupied with something else.

 

Cheryl’s face brightens and she launches into a long recap of her last few months living in Los Angeles. She’d moved there to work at a public relations firm earlier in the year and apparently loves it, which doesn’t surprise Betty too much. She’s never been to LA, but she’s pretty sure that the hyper-focus on image would necessitate a thick skin that Cheryl definitely has. 

 

“You have to come out and visit, Betty,” Cheryl tells her, taking another sip of her tea. Her long red fingernails curl around the dark green mug, giving off an unintentional Christmas vibe. “Jason always wanted to live near the ocean. I think I’m finally reaching the point where it’s a happy reminder to see the beach. It’s kind of … nice,” she finishes, looking a little embarrassed at the sappiness of her own words.

 

Betty squeezes Cheryl’s hand, knowing exactly how she feels. Cheryl and her twin brother Jason had both had weird relationships with their parents - the Blossoms had always felt a little more like a business than a family to Betty, and it showed in the way they treated their children - but they’d been thick as thieves, sticking together through all the bullshit. She had been close with Polly as well, but the two-year age difference did create a slight separation in their formative years, and then later Polly’s drug use had driven another wedge between them. Still, things hadn’t been the same for Betty since her death and she knows that things would never again be the same for Cheryl either; it was another thing that bonded them together. The final two, the last of a forgotten tribe.

 

“Who or what is Jughead?” Cheryl asks suddenly, glancing down at her phone.

 

Betty frowns in confusion. “Um … my neighbour,” she says. “He lives across the hall. How do you - why?”

 

“He just liked my instagram photo,” Cheryl smirks, showing Betty her phone screen. “You commented on it, remember? It probably showed up on his activity page or something. He doesn’t have any pictures on his instagram, though.” Her fingers tap further. “He’s following like, six people.” She looks over at Betty. “Is his name seriously  _ Jughead?”  _

 

“I think it’s a nickname.” Betty squirms uncomfortably and takes a long sip of tea, unsure how much she wants to tell Cheryl about him. She means well - at least lately - but much like Veronica, has a tendency to meddle in a way that often makes things worse rather than better. She should probably message him and tell him not to comment on it, she realizes, and when she pulls her phone out again to text him she finds a message waiting.

 

**_I don’t think I’ve seen you in red before,_ ** it says. 

 

Betty bites her lip and quickly replies to him.  **_She promised she wouldn’t post that picture! I look ridiculous._ **

 

“Are you texting him?!” Cheryl demands, placing a hand on Betty’s wrist.

 

“Yes,” Betty answers simply, giving her a pointed look that says  _ butt out.  _

 

“You’re gonna need to show me a picture. Wait, is this guy, like - are you guys dating?!”

 

Betty shakes her head and swipes through her messages to find a photo of the two of them from Halloween that Veronica had taken. They’re both smiling in it, having just won another beer pong game, and Jughead’s hand is decidedly secure on her waist. “We’re just friends,” she tells Cheryl as she hands her the phone.

 

Cheryl looks at it closely. “He’s cute. Tall. Nice smile. Oops, hang on, you just got a - oh my god.” She purses her lips and gives Betty an expectant look. “Just friends, huh?”

 

_ Uh oh.  _ Betty’s eyes widen. “What?”

 

She shoves the phone back, open to a new text from Jughead.  **_I think you look sexy._ **

 

Betty immediately feels her cheeks heat up. “It’s not what you think,” she says weakly, looking down to a second text from him.  **_I just realized how creepy that sounds, forget I said that._ **

 

“I think your attractive neighbour is flirting with you,” Cheryl says, finishing her tea and moving to examine her nails. “Is it not that?”

 

Against her will, Betty feels a small smile come across her face. “Maybe it’s what you think,” she allows. “His roommate is dating Veronica.” She looks down at her phone and re-reads his messages. She can perfectly picture his flustered expression at having sent the first text; biting her lip, Betty replies,  **_Forget it because it sounds bad or because I’m not sexy?_ **

 

“This is pretty simple, Betty.” Cheryl seems to decide that her nails are acceptable and crosses her legs under the blanket. “Do you like him?”

 

Before she can respond to Cheryl, Jughead sends another text.  **_Definitely not the second one._ ** Betty swallows, looks up at Cheryl and confesses, “Yeah.”

 

“Then do something about it! Jesus. You Cooper girls were always so purposely demure. Hit it, Betty.”

 

Betty rubs her face with her hands anxiously. “I’m so bad at that kind of thing,” she says to her palms.

 

“Then let him take charge,” Cheryl advises. She grabs Betty’s phone and brings up the photo of her and Jughead again. She points to Jughead’s face. “A jawline like that is made for a feminine inner thigh.”

 

_ “Cheryl,  _ oh my god,” Betty says, mildly horrified at her forwardness. She snatches her phone back, cheeks blazing red, and pointedly stares at the trees as she attempts to get that image out of her head. Jughead’s face against her leg, those full lips, his  _ fingers-- _

 

“Just doing my duty to corrupt you,” Cheryl says cheerfully. “But I’m serious, Betty. I know exactly what kind of bullshit you’ve been through in the last couple of years. When I moved to LA I decided to quit wallowing in my own self-pity. You should do the same. Let yourself have some fun.”

 

Betty presses her lips together, her eyes falling to her phone again. Cheryl’s right, she thinks. She deserves a little of that happy feeling - including the soft butterflies she’d gotten a few days earlier when Jughead had hugged her. She wants more. So she brings the text conversation back up and sends a heart back to him, then puts her phone away and leans her head against Cheryl’s shoulder. Her cousin drops her own head atop Betty’s, and they sit on the porch until her mother eventually calls them for dinner.

 

\--

 

Betty returns to Boston three days later to a couple of unfinished assignments and even more laundry. She’s not quite sure when Jughead is supposed to be back in town; there had been some mention of Archie going to New York to meet Veronica’s parents, but she was unsure about Jughead’s role in all of that given that he had been with Archie’s family in Riverdale for the holiday. 

 

She decides to figure it out later and put a load of dirty clothes in to get that chore out of the way. Like usual, Betty gets dressed in athletic clothes, intending to get a quick workout in while her clothes are in the washer. She takes her basket of light colours down to the laundry room on the first floor, puts them in a washing machine, carefully measures the required detergent, and sets the cycle to delicate. Betty tightens her ponytail and is about to head to the gym when the door to the laundry room opens and Jughead walks in.

 

“Hey!” she blurts out, not expecting to see him here. Of all the places in the building that she’s run into him or Archie, she’s never once seen either of them in the communal laundry room.

 

Jughead looks equally surprised to see her. “Hi,” he says, setting his laundry basket down and smiling at her. “How was Thanksgiving?”

 

“It was good,” Betty says, returning the smile. “Yours?”

 

He nods. “Also good.” He lifts the top of one of the washers and begins to put his clothes in. All dark colours, Betty notes. “I bought JB a plane ticket to come see me in February.”

 

“That’s so awesome!” Betty exclaims. It had broken her heart to see how disappointed he’d been at not being able to see his sister for Thanksgiving; she’s thrilled that they managed to work out an alternate visit. “I’m so happy for you!” She bounces over to him and wraps him in a hug before she can think twice about it, squeezing him tightly. 

 

Jughead hugs her back. “Thanks, Betts,” he says. He’s still smiling when they break apart; Betty’s pretty sure this is the longest consecutive smile she’s ever seen him give. “Is it weird if I say I missed you? I know it was less than a week.”

 

Betty blushes and looks away briefly before flicking her eyes back to his. “I missed you too,” she says, her hands fidgeting with the hem of her athletic tank. “We need to hang out soon.”

 

“Agreed.” Jughead nods his head at her outfit. “Going to the gym?”

 

“Yeah, it’s something to do while I wait for my clothes to go into the dryer. Wanna join?” she asks.

 

He seems to hesitate for a second, but then smiles and shrugs. “Yeah, sure. Give me a sec, I just need to start this and then go change quickly.”

 

“Okay.” Betty puts a hand on the laundry room door. “I’m just gonna go warm up. See you in a few minutes.”

 

She slips out of the laundry room and walks down the hallway a few feet to the entrance of the building’s small gym. Finding it mercifully empty, Betty turns to the one mirrored wall and quickly adjusts her clothes to make sure they’re at their most flattering. She then hops on a treadmill and gets a five-minute warmup jog out of the way.

 

He appears just as she’s finishing up and walking over to a weight rack. Betty takes note of his somewhat skinny legs, realizing that she’s never really seen him in shorts before, and gives him a little wave. He returns it and heads straight for the treadmill she’d just vacated. Betty puts a few extra plates on the 35-pound bar and begins to do her deadlifts, focusing on not hunching her shoulders or over-arching her back. When she sets the bar down for a minute of rest between sets, Betty can see Jughead’s eyes quickly dart away in the mirror.

 

She smiles to herself, remembering how flustered he’d been about her body when they had waffles, as well as his text from Thanksgiving, and makes a mental note to channel her inner Cheryl a little more. So after her next set, Betty catches his eye again and winks at him, which turns his ears a little red. 

 

After deadlifts, Betty moves on to step-ups. She ups the size of the dumbbells in her hands after each set, which makes her thighs burn deliciously. She recalls what Cheryl had said about his jawline and does an extra set just in case, gritting her teeth against the effort. Jughead seems to be doing interval sprints on the treadmill, alternating two minutes of high speed with two of a more manageable pace, and by the time Betty has started her push-ups she can see the sweat coming off his forehead.

 

It’s kinda hot, she thinks, and has to turn away from him in order to focus on finishing her circuit - two more sets of pushups, then three of twenty burpees each.

 

Once she’s done her final set of burpees, Betty takes a long swig from her water bottle and wanders over to Jughead’s treadmill. His long legs are striding purposefully and he seems to be concentrating on his music, so Betty takes a moment to appreciate how attractive he is. Even with the sweaty hair on his forehead - or maybe especially with it, she can’t figure it out - he’s hot. His blue eyes dart over to her after a delayed few seconds and he drops an earbud, slowing the pace of his machine.

 

“Looks like you were doing some intense lifting over there,” Jughead comments. “You all done?”

 

Betty nods. “Yeah. I’m tired,” she admits.

 

He chuckles. “I’ll have to carry you up the stairs.”

 

“Wouldn’t be the first time.” She bites her lower lip. “You’re a fast runner,” she comments, glancing down at her phone when the alarm goes off.

 

“Nah. I just have more legs than torso,” he jokes. He tilts his head toward her phone. “Laundry alarm?” When she nods, he says, “Go ahead, I’ll just be a few minutes behind.”

 

“Okay.” Betty taps the side of his treadmill and lets her eyes sweep across him again as he continues to run. She finally snaps out of it and takes a deep breath in to calm herself. “I’ll see you in there.”

 

She rushes out of the gym before he responds, shaking her head at herself for her awkwardness. This is  _ not  _ what Cheryl would do. Or Veronica. They would’ve been a lot smoother than  _ “you’re a fast runner”  _ \- honestly, who the hell was she?

 

“Get in the game, Cooper,” Betty mutters to herself, opening the door of an empty dryer. She begins to select items from her washing machine and transfers them into the dryer one by one, careful to set aside any delicate items that needed to be hung to dry in her living room. 

 

Jughead walks in just as she’s adding a lacy bralette to the ‘no dryer’ pile, and because this is just how her life goes, he of course notices it immediately. “What is  _ that?”  _ he blurts out, his face already beginning to blush even as his mouth is still moving.

 

Betty presses her lips together to stop herself from laughing at him. “Lingerie,” she responds simply, making a mental note to thank Cheryl for making her buy it on Black Friday.

 

Jughead lets out a teasing low whistle. “It looks … nice.” He lifts the lid of his own washing machine and begins to mirror her process, albeit with a lot less ceremony. “I’ll bet it looks even nicer on,” he says to the washer. He grabs his clothes in large armfuls and dumps them into a dryer, the tips of his ears still flushed a telltale red colour.

 

Her jaw drops slightly, and Betty rushes to close it before he notices. She will never be able to figure him out: he’s both bold and shy, soft and rough, sweet and salty. “You’re sweet,” Betty says, taking the small pile of hang-to-dry clothes from the top of the dryer and tucking them under her arm. “Maybe you’ll see it one day.”

 

Jughead finally lifts his head from the dryer and turns to look at her. Betty can see the both the playful glint and the nervousness in his eyes. She doesn’t want the conversation to end, and is about to thank him for his compliment on her cousin-swap photo with Cheryl when he says quietly, “I’d be the luckiest bastard in the world. You’re so beautiful, Betty. I hope you know that.”

 

_ Okay.  _ She’s done; she can’t handle this anymore. Betty takes her free hand and sets it on his face. His skin was so smooth, even with the slight sheen of sweat from his workout. He’s so enigmatic in a weirdly private way: sullen on the outside, but inside he’s also the guy that’ll take care of a near-stranger when she’s sick. He surprises her with compliments in the most adorable way, like he’s not sure if he’s  _ allowed  _ to tell her he thinks she’s pretty. There’s something so precious and sweet and sexy about it and him and the way he is, and Betty doesn’t think she can get enough of it. 

 

So she shakes her head, then leans in and kisses him softly. It’s just a gentle press, nothing deep or writhing, but it’s full of sweet promise, like him. She pulls away slowly, letting the air hang heavily between them for a few moments, then blushes at the surprised, cheesy smile that he’s giving her.

 

“I have to go hang these up,” Betty says, gesturing to her pile of wet clothes. “But I’ve really enjoyed, uh, doing laundry with you. We should do it again sometime.” She nibbles anxiously at her lower lip and puts her free hand over his heart, patting his chest awkwardly. “I’ll, um - shit.” She’s backing up slowly and stumbles a little over her own feet, running into the laundry room door with a gentle  _ oof.  _ “I’ll see you later,” she finishes as she leaves, taking note of his amused grin. “Bye!”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, so if you couldn't tell by now this is literally just trash. Haha. Thanks once again for all the love, you guys. You've been so encouraging and it's meant everything to me in this process.
> 
> Only a few chapters left!


	8. eight

_Such a thing of wonder in this crowd_  
_I’m a stranger in this town,  
You’re free with me_

  * Jeff Buckley, “Everybody Here Wants You”



 

There’s a three week span between the end of the Thanksgiving long weekend and the beginning of the Christmas break that Jughead _hates._ Nothing good ever happens. First, he always has to finish a bunch of schoolwork before the semester ends, and now that he’s in a master’s program that really just means that he has a lot of writing to do. He still prefers that to actual exams, but it does take a considerable amount of time in comparison to the few nights of cramming he’d usually spend for a regular final.

 

Second, it’s officially the fucking _Christmas season,_ and there are few things more annoying than the perpetual sound of jaunty Christmas music being played from every public speaker in Boston. Jughead rarely has anyone that he needs to buy presents for, so at least he gets to skip that particular pain, but everybody around him seems to constantly have some kind of added stress about the status of their Christmas shopping and it ends up rubbing off on him anyway. Especially Archie - every year, he acts like deciding what to get his girlfriend _du jour_ is the most critical decision he’ll ever have to make. His inability to ever figure it out is something that Jughead has always chalked up to the fact that he never truly got to know any of his girlfriends, and his quintessential Archie-ness: harmlessly ignorant but well-meaning.

 

(Although this year, Archie hasn’t had any mental breakdowns over a gift for Veronica - so maybe, Jughead thinks, just _maybe_ Archie is finally showing some progress.)

 

The third reason Jughead dislikes this time of year is entirely because of his casual job as a valet. There are countless office Christmas parties and dinners and special events that his restaurant serves a venue for, and nearly every night between Thanksgiving and Christmas is packed. He’s picked up a lot of weeknight shifts in addition to his weekend ones, which obviously means great money but doesn’t leave a lot of spare time, particularly when combined with his academic workload.

 

Usually, this is fine. Jughead’s spare time has always just been spent either getting more writing done or wasting time playing video games, so the loss of a couple weeks’ worth of late-night TV means no harm done. _Usually._ But this year, a girl moved in across the hall from him. A beautiful, funny, intelligent girl that Jughead is painfully into and wants to spend more time with, except for the _no time_ problem. It’s additionally frustrating because after weeks of flirting, they’d finally kissed - just in time to get fully preoccupied with the annoying responsibilities of adult life.

 

His one comfort is that for as busy as he is, Betty is too. She has a lot of end-of-term academic responsibilities as well (probably more than him, he thinks; her program is a bit more class-based than his is) and she’s also been planning some kind of conference at her assistant job. It’s supposed to happen early in the new year sometime (February, Jughead seems to recall) and so has been occupying a lot of what should probably be downtime for her.

 

Tonight, Jughead is trudging home from the MTBA station, feet dragging through the freshly fallen snow, his red bowtie already off and his beanie securely back on his head. He’d managed to catch the last train home, saving himself ten bucks in Uber fees, and is looking forward to _not_ being on his feet. He even takes the elevator once he gets inside the building and feels absolutely no shame for his laziness. It gets him an additional two minutes, which he has elaborate plans to spend dozing on the couch with one hand in a bag of chips.

 

It mostly comes true. Jughead slips into his apartment and immediately goes to his room, changing quickly out of his valet uniform and into a pair of sweatpants and an old sweater. He grabs a Coke from the fridge and a bag of half-eaten miniature Reese’s Pieces, then collapses onto the couch. Thankfully, Archie is already in bed, which spares him the effort of having to grunt a hello. His laptop is sitting on the coffee table, practically calling to him, but Jughead has zero energy left. It’s not often that he can’t bring himself to write, but tonight is one of those times. He puts an old _Avengers_ movie on Netflix, taking some degree of comfort in both the familiarity of a movie that he’s already seen and the predictability of mindless big-screen action moves.

 

He’s about one-fifth of the way through it when his phone buzzes. Jughead flicks his eyes to the clock in the corner of his phone, taking note of the glowing 1:30 time. Betty and Archie are really the only people that text him these days, and since Archie’s snores can be faintly heard through his bedroom wall, Jughead’s pretty sure it’s the former. He swipes his thumb across the unlock pattern and smiles when he sees her name pop up.

 

**_I cannot wait until the end of semester,_ ** it simply says. He figures she’s probably doing homework (like he _should_ be doing) and winces in sympathy for her. He taps out **_yikes, you’re up late,_ ** and one minute later his phone is ringing.

 

He answers it with a quiet smile to himself. “Hello?”

 

“Hey.” Her voice is soft as well, even though she doesn’t have a roommate to not wake. “Sorry, I have a story and I’m too lazy to type it out.”

 

Jughead leans back into the couch and puts his feet up on the coffee table, tilting his head back. “No problem. What’s up?”

 

Betty immediately launches into a tale that Jughead quickly realizes is not about school, but about work. Apparently, she’d had a late-scheduled meeting earlier that day to go over the proposed agenda for the conference she’s planning, so that she knows how many breakout rooms she needs to arrange with the venue. “Which is simple enough,” she continues, the exasperation clear in her voice. “Except then the PI and the project manager - my actual boss - got into an argument about panel length and the number of questions that can be reasonably accommodated, and somehow that lasted almost an entire extra hour. Which of course I had to sit through.”

 

“That sounds frustrating,” Jughead offers. He doesn’t have any advice for her, but he’s also pretty sure that she mostly just needs to vent. And for that, he has ears.

 

“Thanks,” she sighs. “It was mostly annoying because it was already scheduled for five-thirty on a Friday, and I didn’t end up getting home until after eight. And when I did finally get back, I had to write a sample article for a class, then do some more editing on my term project. Which I really am honestly excited about, but rereading and rewriting my in-depth look at campaign finance reform is not exactly how I saw myself spending a Friday night.”

 

Jughead laughs softly. “I get that. I spent my night parking and retrieving expensive cars that I could never afford in my life, and getting dismissed by rich guys with drunk trophy wives.”

 

“We’re living the dream,” Betty jokes.

 

He grins at the ceiling. “You know, if you’re wired and can’t sleep, you’re more than welcome to come across the hall. I have about one-quarter of a bag of Reese’s Pieces that I can offer you.”

 

She giggles, a quiet and vaguely musical sound. “I’d love to,” she says, “but I’m - um - I’m actually in the bathtub.”

 

_Fuck._ Jughead’s eyes close. “Well.” He clears his throat and tries not to sound too much like a horny thirteen-year-old who just saw boobs in a movie for the first time. “There’s an image that I’m going to be stuck on for awhile.” That earns him more giggles, and now that he’s listening closely he is pretty sure he can hear the sound of water sloshing in the background. He bets her hair is twisted up into a knot so that it doesn’t get wet, and that she’s got a glass of wine or something beside her, like in the movies. He wonders if there are candles involved.

 

“It’s not that spectacular,” she says softly. “I went to the diner for food on the way home, so--”

 

It’s his turn to laugh now: twice, coarse and empty. “Betty, you - obviously you have no idea who you’re talking to,” he says, swallowing. “Knowing you went to the diner to get supper just makes this whole you-naked-in-the-bathtub thing even hotter.” There’s silence for a moment, so he adds, “What did you order?”

 

“Tuna melt.”

 

Jughead lets out an exaggerated “mmm” sound. “Yeah. That’s definitely … I dunno.”

 

“Hot?” Betty supplies, amusement evident in her voice. “This might be the weirdest flirting I’ve ever done. Is that supposed to be a euphemism?”

 

“What, a tuna melt?” Jughead shudders. “I don’t know about you, Betts, but I don’t think a sexual tuna melt can mean anything good for me.”

 

“No!” she giggles, and then _yeah,_ that’s definitely the sound of water dripping. “Never mind, this went downhill a lot quicker than I thought.”

 

Jughead closes his eyes again and smiles. The couch is soft underneath him, but not quite as soft as her. “It’s late, my brain isn’t functioning all the way. Too much pre-Christmas cheer.”

 

“I hear you. Lots going on. I still have to find something for my mom, and like, there’s _time,_ theoretically, but I have no idea when I’ll get that done.” Betty sounds like her voice is echoing a bit, which Jughead knows means he’s been put on speakerphone. He assumes she’s exiting the bathtub, because there’s also the distant sound of draining water in the background, and he’s trying really hard not to conjure images of her naked on her bathroom mat. “You have big Christmas plans?”

 

“Just the annual Andrews family Christmas,” Jughead says dismissively, grateful to have something else to think about for a moment. “And … my annual trip to see my dad.” He swallows, leaving the unspoken phrase _in prison_ hanging in the air.  He’s told her about his family, about his father’s incarceration and his mother’s abandonment, but it’s still nerve-wracking to bring it up again - like maybe this time, she’ll decide that’s too much drama to get involved with.

 

He has nothing to worry about, evidently, because Jughead can actually hear the smile in Betty’s voice when she says, “That’s great!”

 

“Yeah, he doesn’t get a lot of visitors, so.” Jughead shifts uncomfortably. “What about you?”

 

“Vermont again,” Betty says, the renewed clarity in her voice evidence that he’s off speakerphone. He wonders what she’s gotten dressed in. “Which is not going to be that fun. But I get to hang out with Cheryl at least.” She lets out an unexpectedly loud yawn, and he chuckles softly.

 

“Bedtime?” Jughead guesses.

 

“Mm. I think so.” Her voice is already lighter. “I want to see you before we have to go home for Christmas. We have to find a night.”

 

Jughead smiles to himself, picturing her beside him. “I’ll look and see what I can swing,” he promises. “Sleep tight, Betts.”

 

“Goodnight, Juggie,” she whispers. They hang up and Jughead lets his eyes close too. Maybe he can chase her into dreamland. He focuses on the worn cushions beneath him, tugs a soft blanket on top of himself, and falls asleep on the couch.

 

\--

 

After a little maneuvering, they manage to pinpoint one evening where they’re both free. It’s a Wednesday two weeks later, the night before Jughead has to leave to visit his dad, but by then Betty will have all of her school responsibilities taken care of and the project manager she works for will have left for Christmas holidays. Jughead spends practically every weekend night until then - and some weeknights - working at the restaurant, and by the time the stretch is over he’s pretty sure he’s driven thousands of cars. He’s also made thousands of dollars in tips, which is pretty nice. He sends some to Jellybean and sets aside another amount to add to his dad’s commissary account, then puts the rest in his savings account for rainy days.

 

They agree on a movie night, because it’s cold outside and neither of them are interested in dealing with the snow. Jughead is secretly pleased by this, because it probably means he’ll get to have Betty cuddle up next to him. He’s never been the cuddly type - dating or not, it involves a different type of intimacy that he’s generally not familiar or comfortable with - but when it comes to Betty, he wants everything. She’d volunteered to cook, but the idea of her putting all the effort in made him feel a little guilty, so they’d compromised on him bringing over takeout for supper and her making snacks for later. Wanting it to be good, Jughead gets an Uber to take him to his favourite Mexican place and picks up a bunch of tacos, beans, and rice.

 

He’s at Betty’s door at seven sharp with the bag in hand, having mumbled some excuse to Archie before his Uber arrived. The stress of the last few weeks is catching up to him and he’s sleepy already, but the excitement of getting to hang out with Betty is keeping him awake and eager. He’d even combed his hair in case she takes his beanie again, which he acknowledges is probably the real sign that he likes her. He’s been wearing that beanie since he was a preteen - it’s a sort of security blanket for him, inexplicable in nature but comforting nonetheless.

 

Betty opens the door with a bright smile. “Hi!” she greets, stepping to the side. “Come on in.”

 

Jughead obeys, but not before taking attentive note of her outfit, which if he really thinks about it is a little unfair. Her blonde hair is swept up in a knot, looser than he’d ever seen her with and strikingly similar to how he had imagined her hair to be the night they’d spoken while she took a bath. She’s dressed in little black shorts and a loose-fitting white sweater with a deep V-neck. There’s some kind of light blue lace peeking out from the neckline that is framing her cleavage in a manner that Jughead can only describe as enticing. He swallows and looks away.

 

“I brought tacos,” he says instead, walking to the kitchen and placing the bag on her counter. “From Ernie’s. This place is amazing.”

 

Betty appears at his side. “It smells really good,” she says. Jughead can feel her eyes on him as he starts to take the tacos and side dishes out of the bag. A moment later, her hand touches his forearm. “Jug?”

 

He stops and looks over. “Yeah?”

 

“I haven’t seen you except in passing for like, two weeks or longer. And I don’t know about you, but that’s been kinda shitty for me.” She smiles at him and takes a step back, opening her arms. “I believe I’ve earned a hug for my patience.”

 

Jughead sets a container of beans down and turns to her with a teasing smile. “I knew you only invited me over for my body,” he jokes, pulling her close and sliding his arms around her.

 

“You caught me,” she says into his chest, her face nuzzling against his shirt. “Mm. You’re so warm.”

 

“Secret furnace,” he says matter of factly, dropping a kiss to the top of her head. Like him, she’s only wearing socks, and it’s at times like this that the height difference between them is most apparent. “And uh, I’m definitely not complaining, but you realize you’re wearing shorts, right?”

 

Betty giggles and pushes back from him. “Oh, I know,” she says, winking at him. She takes a peek inside the taco bag. “So what do we have here?”

 

Jughead bites back a grin and helps her finish unloading the collection of food. He points out the various types of tacos that he’d purchased, not being sure which would be her favourite. They end up taking a chicken, a beef, and a fish taco each and taking them over to her coffee table.

 

“I thought we could watch _Nightmare on Elm Street,”_ Betty proposes, using her TV remote to expertly navigate through her media server. “Thoughts?”

 

“Sticking to the old horror movie theme,” Jughead observes, nodding his support for her choice. He grins at her. “I like it,” he says, taking a bite of his fish taco. “Oh god, and I like this, too. So good.”

 

Betty gives him a curious look and bites into her own fish taco. She nods in agreement as she chews, flashing a thumbs up. The TV starts playing the opening sequence, so the two of them sit back and watch as they eat.

 

Dinner puts them about halfway through the movie, and since Jughead has seen it multiple times he volunteers to clear their plates away while Betty keeps watching. He washes their couple of dishes and throws the garbage away. He’s about to take the garbage out when Betty suddenly screams. Jughead glances over and starts laughing at her. She has a loose-knit blanket pulled over her head and seems to be peeking at the TV from between the thick yarn.

 

“Uh, Betty?” Jughead says, holding onto the side of the counter. “You okay?”

 

Her head appears from beneath the blanket. “Shut up and get over here,” she says with exaggerated annoyance, biting her lower lip. “I wouldn’t need to hide under the blanket if you hadn’t abandoned me during the scary part!”

 

He grins and makes his way back to the couch, where Betty crawls halfway into his lap almost immediately upon him sitting down. Jughead looks down at her and chuckles at her terrified face half-hidden in his chest now. He puts an arm around her and pulls the blanket over top of them both, holding her left leg over his knees with his other hand. “I’ll keep you safe from evil murderers,” he tells her seriously, squeezing her waist affectionately.

 

“I wanted to watch _Friday the 13th_ after this,” Betty says in a whisper, as though Freddy Krueger could hear her through the TV (and the decades).

 

“Too scared to now?” Jughead asks, his eyes fixed on the movie, where Nancy has just lit Freddy on fire and locked him in the basement. “Or what?”

 

Betty cowers again, retreating even further into Jughead. “No,” she says stubbornly, “I just - you probably didn’t come over here expecting me to be a giant baby about this.”

 

“You’re basically on top of me, Betts,” Jughead points out. “Wearing … that. I’m not exactly complaining.”

 

Her head lifts from his shirt and turns slightly toward him. “Wearing what?” she asks in an innocent tone, the corner of her lip between her teeth.

 

Jughead gives her a look. She knows exactly what she’s doing. “Wearing these little shorts,” he says through briefly gritted teeth, sliding his left hand up the outside of her thigh toward her hip. “Knowing damn well how good your legs look.”

 

Betty releases her lip and smiles at him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says, leaning up and giving him an all-too brief peck on his lips. “Now hush. It’s almost over.”

 

Jughead fights the urge to tug her back and kiss her for real. They’ve kissed twice now; both times were initiated by Betty, and both times he’d been caught off guard and didn’t have much of a chance to respond. But she’d told him to watch the movie, so he settles for tightening the arm around her waist. He drops his other hand to the inside of her thigh, his thumb rubbing her skin in small circles, and sets his chin on top of her head, pouting a little.

 

The movie finally ends, and instead of leaning over to switch it to _Friday the 13th,_ Betty unravels herself from Jughead’s lap and makes her way to the kitchen. Jughead watches her, his eyes falling naturally to the dip of her sweater’s neckline. She goes to a container on the countertop and takes the lid off, letting the scent of fresh cookies waft into the air, then sets about making some kind of hot drink.

 

“Can I give you a hand?” he asks, sitting up a little.

 

“I got it,” Betty says with a smile. She sets a tray on the coffee table; there’s a plate of cookies and two steaming mugs of hot chocolate, complete with whipped cream and marshmallows. She skips back to the kitchen and then returns with a bottle of rum. “Want a little spice in your hot chocolate?” she asks.

 

Jughead considers it for a moment. He doesn’t often drink that much, but this is just a shot - and maybe he could use the extra courage. So he nods and watches Betty slip a little rum into each of the mugs, then return the bottle to the cabinet that she’d retrieved it from. She sits back down beside him on the couch, prepares _Friday the 13th,_ and holds her drink.

 

He doesn’t even bother to pretend like he’s not going to cuddle with her again, and judging by the way that Betty snuggles into his side when he drapes his arm around her, she’s on the same page. She gets whipped cream on her nose the next time she sips the hot chocolate, which Jughead intentionally doesn’t point out for twenty minutes. Betty realizes that it’s there when she lifts a hand to tighten her messy bun, and her reaction is just as he’d hoped: a scrunched nose, a falsely annoyed look, and a slight tug of her lips to betray her real opinion.

 

“You’ll pay for that,” Betty says, a smile spreading across her face

 

“Oh yeah?” Jughead challenges, returning the smile. He hauls her completely into his lap, making her release a quiet squeal of unexpected excitement, and then slips his hands around her waist to tickle her.

 

_“Jughead!”_ she shrieks, giggling and pushing at his hands in vain. He grins, not relenting, and lets Betty shove him flat on his back on the couch in her effort to free herself. She straddles his lap, finally capturing one of his wrists in both of her hands, and twists to lay on top of him so that she can immobilize the other.

 

Her face is (perhaps unintentionally) close to his now, and if Jughead tilts his chin down slightly he has an incredible view down her shirt. He lets his eyes stay there for a beat too long; when he looks back up, Betty is watching him. The movie is playing to nobody in the background, but Jughead finds that he doesn’t give a shit. It’s been around for decades - it’ll still be around in another ten minutes. She draws her lower lip between her teeth and releases it slowly, never breaking eye contact, then arches her back a little to expose even more cleavage.

 

It was fucking intentional, this outfit. She planned this whole damn thing - the shorts that wouldn’t keep her warm, the movie that she could barely watch, the shot of courage in their drinks. And he fell for it all, in the best possible way. But now it’s his turn to direct the marionettes, and Jughead isn’t about to let her off scot-free.

 

He leans up and kisses her. Betty gasps a little into his mouth as though she hadn’t been expecting it - impossible, he thinks, not with the way she was looking at him - and she releases his wrist so that she can move her hands into his hair. Jughead’s beanie falls to the ground (or is thrown there - he can’t tell with her tongue peeking into his mouth, and he doesn’t care either), and he slides his hands across her back gently.

 

Their kisses are deep and slow; it’s less of a cliched battle and more of a dance. It takes them a few moments to get a good rhythm, but once they fall into sync, Betty lets out a quiet moan. The sound kicks something into gear inside him, some kind of stupid, primal urge to brag to the world that _yeah, I did that, she liked that._ Instead, his knuckles drag over the knots in her back and down toward her hips.

 

Betty breaks the kiss for air and ends up gasping into his neck, her nose pressed against his skin. “You’re really good at that,” she breathes, settling a hand on his shoulder so she can see his face.

 

The flush of pride hits again. Jughead grins, sucking in a breath of air, and kisses her instead of replying. His hands uncurl, thumbs gripping her hips momentarily, then he lets his palms slide up and over her ass, squeezing gently. Now it’s his turn to make an unexpected noise, releasing something of a guttural grunt into her mouth, which makes her giggle and push away from him.

 

“After all those weeks of you staring at my ass--”

 

“Shh, you didn’t notice that,” Jughead says, squeezing it again. “I was really sneaky about it.”

 

Betty rolls her eyes at him but smiles as she dips her head in for another kiss. She nibbles on his lower lip, sending a wave of _something_ moving through Jughead’s body. His fingers creep under the hem of her shorts and rub the skin where her leg joins. Betty whines in response and presses her hips into his.

 

“Holy fuck,” Jughead breathes, dragging his mouth away from Betty’s. The sensation of _that_ was something else altogether, and if she wants to take things at any kind of slow or even moderate pace, she’s going to have to stop doing that.

 

But then Betty sits up, her hands move to the hem of her sweater, and she strips it off. So - maybe not slow, Jughead thinks, his eyes tracing the smooth planes of her collarbone and admiring the soft, unblemished expanse of skin that she’d just revealed. She’s wearing some kind of lace bra thing that seems like it maybe isn’t actually a bra, because it starts sort of mid-ribcage and gathers her breasts together instead of separating them. Jughead vaguely recognizes it as the lacy thing he’d seen in the laundry room after Thanksgiving and tilts his head curiously.

 

Her soft giggle breaks his reverie. Jughead looks up at Betty’s face and sees her trying desperately to suppress her laughter. “It’s a bralette,” she says, as though that’s somehow explanatory in any way. All he knows is that her boobs are nearly spilling out of it and her lips are quirked in that one fucking adorable way she does, and that she’s the most beautiful girl he’s ever seen in his life.

 

“You are so gorgeous,” he tells her, shaking his head briefly at himself. He reaches up and tucks a stray lock of hair behind her ear, his thumb brushing her cheek as he does so. Soft as silk - what a fucking lucky bastard he is.

 

Betty’s hands slide down across his face, her palms cupping his jaw. After he’s done speaking, she presses a gentle kiss to his mouth. “Flattery will get you everywhere,” she tells him softly, twisting her body slightly. She rests her head on his chest, settling her body between his legs, and turns to face the TV. She’s quiet for a moment, then says, “Juggie?”

 

His fingers are busy untangling her messy bun and his brain is occupied with trying to suppress his erection, but his eyes snap up at his name. “Yeah?”

 

“I think we’re going to have to start the movie over.”

 

\--

 

Jughead falls asleep on her couch and then pads across the hall in his socks at 4:00am. Four hours later, he’s on a bus to upstate New York visit his father in prison.

 

The visit goes well, like they usually do. It occurs to Jughead as he’s entering that this may be the last time he has to come visit his father here; FP is up for parole within the year, and apparently has a pretty decent chance of getting it. He’s there for about an hour, which is spent sitting in an uncomfortable plastic chair across a table from his dad. The forced sobriety of jail has been good for FP; he’s even shaving regularly, something he didn’t seem to be able to manage when Jughead was growing up.

 

Jughead gives his father a whitewashed version of the last few months of his life, from the plans he’s made with Jellybean for February to the progress he’s made on his MFA. He leaves Betty out - yeah, they’d spent an awesome night cuddling and kissing on her couch, but they hadn’t exactly talked about what they were. He definitely has plans to ask her out and he’s pretty sure she’s going to say yes, but still. She’s not his girlfriend (yet). There’s no reason to bring her up to his father.

 

They don’t really exchange presents - there’s not much FP can do for him in jail, after all - but Jughead adds money to his dad’s commissary like usual, they hug, and then visiting hours are over. He departs after a last salute to FP from the tip of his chin and smiles at the matching expression on his dad’s face. He likes seeing his dad sober and put-together, even if it _is_ in an orange jumpsuit - like this is the father that could’ve been, one whose eyes are all the way open and whose brain isn’t blurry. Jughead sends an unspoken hope into the universe that if his dad does get out this year, he can stay that way.

 

Afterward, he takes the late bus down to Riverdale, arriving at some point in the mid-evening. His first stop is Pop’s for a burger and milkshake, then he heads to Fred’s house. Archie is already there, joking around with his dad. His parents were divorced, but the bond that Archie has with his father is unbreakable. Jughead used to be jealous of them, but after enough years spent with the Andrews family, that had mostly gone away.

 

Because as he walks into the living room, both Fred and Archie jump up with muted, manly excitement. They hug him, clap his shoulder, and offer him a drink. Fred tousles his hair, teases him about his beanie, and demands to be caught up on the boys’ life in Boston. He’s one of Fred’s sons, just like Archie - minus the red hair and musical talent, plus the brooding quiet and the distinct _click-clack_ of a keyboard at midnight. It’s home, this place.

 

(These people.)

 

Jughead texts Betty a fair bit over the week or so that they’re both away. On Christmas Day she sends him a Christmas tree emoji and the message **_Merry Christmas Juggie :) I’m sorry you can’t be with your sister today._ **

 

He’s lounging on the couch in the garage, watching Archie strum on one of his old guitars, and had honestly not expected to hear from her until later. From what she’s said, her family seems like the rigid-tradition type, complete with the prerequisite to dress nicely on special occasions. In the Andrews house, there is no such requirement, and as a result Jughead hasn’t worn real pants in two days.

 

Still, he’s grateful to hear from her, and doesn’t bother trying to fight the smile on his face when he responds. **_Same to you, for both things,_ ** he tells her, then adds, **_I wish I could’ve met her._ **

 

**_She loved Christmas :)_ ** is Betty’s reply, which makes his heart break a little for her. Yeah, he doesn’t have his mom or dad or even Jellybean with him, but he has Archie and Fred, and they’re the family that chose him. Jughead swallows and racks his brain, trying to think of what to say, but his phone buzzes again and he can see that she’s sent another text. **_She would’ve liked you,_ ** it says, **_she always had a thing for bad boys who are secretly marshmallows on the inside._ **

 

“Is that Betty?” Archie asks, barely looking up from his guitar.

 

Jughead nods and glances over, shrugging his shoulder a little. “She says Merry Christmas.” She hadn’t, of course, but he’s sure that she wishes it.

 

“Back at her. Dude, listen to this one,” Archie says, his fingers fumbling briefly over a chord before he adjusts his fingering. He starts to strum again, an unfamiliar staccato rhythm, and then begins to hum a wordless melody for accompaniment.

 

**_Is that my rep?_ ** Jughead texts Betty, flashing a thumbs-up at Archie. He readjusts himself on the couch, flopping onto his back, and drums his fingers on the floor in time with Archie’s new song.

 

**_Yeah, embrace it,_ ** she responds. **_She’s not the only Cooper girl who’s into that._ **

 

\--

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Once again overwhelmed by all the love. You guys are the bee's knees.


	9. nine

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here we are at the end of this fluff-fest! I hope you all liked the ride. I changed my plan for this a little bit and dropped a chapter. I'll leave the door open for a coda or two (potentially), but otherwise that's all she wrote!

_ Even if loving meant leaving, or solitude, or sorrow, love was worth every penny of its price. _

  * Paulo Coelho, By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept



  
  


The new semester begins in the dawn of a post-Christmas haze, and things are the exact same as before.

 

Betty’s back hits the heavy steel door of the laundry room and the knob digs uncomfortably into her side, but the pain barely registers through the overpowering feeling of Jughead’s lips on her pulse point. Her hands push his beanie to the floor, her fingers tug at his hair, and she makes a mental amendment: _ almost  _ the same as before.

 

They’ve been doing this for the past three weeks, ever since they’d both returned from Christmas holidays. Just before leaving for Vermont, Betty had taken the metaphorical bull by the horns and made a Cheryl Blossom-esque move on Jughead that she’s extremely relieved to note was well received. She’d spent the Christmas break smiling like an idiot at her phone, reading and re-reading the various texts that he’d sent her, and as soon as she got back to Boston she’d marched over to his apartment and kissed him again, just in case.

 

But now it’s late January, and they’re still making out in her apartment and in laundry rooms and in the gym when it’s empty. The main problem is that Jughead lives with Archie, and Archie is dating Veronica, who Betty knows will  _ not  _ leave them alone once she finds out. Betty knows that Veronica means well, but she wants her and Jughead to have a few more weeks of dating - or whatever this is - under their communal belt before they subject themselves to the Lodge heiress and all her inevitable plans for double dates and joint vacations.

 

They haven’t had sex yet (at least not in the heteronormative penetrative sense), mostly because Betty is waiting for Jughead to make that particular move. She feels like she’s put all of their metaphorical first-feet-forward since they’d started flirting late last fall. His shyness and uncertainty is endearing - even cute, sometimes - but now Betty wants to be the one who is caught off guard. She’s ready, willing, and able, and has been dropping hints about it left and right. The ball is in his court, and if he wants her, he’s going to have to be the one to make it happen.

 

Which isn’t to say that he hasn’t been incredible so far, or that he hasn’t tried to ask her out. On the contrary: he’s an excellent kisser with strong hands, nimble fingers, and a sexy smile who has treated her with the utmost respect and kindness. He’s also asked her to dinner, but when they’d been walking down the street toward the restaurant, Betty’s stomach full of butterflies and nerves, they’d run into Veronica on her way to meet Archie. The first date had turned into more of a group thing, and they haven’t rescheduled yet.

 

The one upside to this that Betty can find is that it turns out she sort of likes sneaking around. It’s a little secret that only the two of them share, and it makes the stolen glances and private touches even better. Like now, his hand is slipping underneath the hem of her shirt, and she swears that the swipe of his thumb across her ribcage is  _ just slightly  _ more electric because nobody is expecting them to do this. Especially when he’s doing it here, in a semi-public place where anybody could walk in and see them.

 

So maybe she has a little bit of an exhibitionist kink. Sue her.

 

“I swear to God, Betty,” Jughead breathes into her neck. His hand pushes further and he lets out a swear when it becomes apparent that she’s wearing another flimsy bralette. It  _ may  _ have been an intentional choice, just a little something she’d thrown on when he’d texted and asked her if she wanted to do laundry.

 

_ Laundry.  _ He’s lucky he’s cute, she thinks, because he has terrible pickup lines.

 

“What do you swear?” Betty asks, gasping a little as his hand tugs the lace down and cups her left breast. His thumb sweeps roughly across her nipple, and she pulls at his hair again in response.

 

“I swear you’re not real,” he says, tugging questioningly at the waistband of her sweatpants. She nods hurriedly over his shoulder, and his other hand snakes beneath them. “Nobody is this beautiful.”

 

She’s too distracted to blush, but she does smile a little at his words. “It’s all an illusion,” she says, catching his lips in a brief, hard kiss.

 

Jughead shakes his head and pecks her lips a second time. His gaze is piercing, eyes fixed on hers, and she’s unable to look away from him. He inhales in short, dragging breaths as his fingers slide across her folds and his thumb presses on her nerves with rhythmic circles. Betty lifts a leg so that he has a better angle, but he’s too tall for her to rest on his hip; instead, she hitches it around the back of his thigh and pulls at his hair until he kisses her.

 

She’s agonizingly close and tells him as much, a statement that he responds to by chuckling against her earlobe and increasing the pace of his thumb. Then all at once, he slides one finger inside her, hooks it ever-so-slightly, and squeezes her breast firmly. Betty has zero control over the noise that she lets out, a delicate kind of half-scream, and he kisses her to silence her as she comes.

 

As soon as the kiss breaks, Betty drops her head against the heavy door and breathes heavily. “Oh my god,” she says in a rush, lifting her leg down from him, “Juggie, that was -- you are--”

 

“It was all you,” Jughead tells her, kissing her softly. He goes to the sink in the corner of the room and rinses his hand, his arousal still painfully evident by the tent in his jeans.

 

Betty reaches into her shirt and adjusts her bralette, shaking her head at him. “It was literally all you and those goddamn fingers of yours, so I don’t know what you’re talking about. Though I’m not complaining.”

 

“If my ‘goddamn fingers’ can do anything, it’s because of how fucking attracted to you I am,” Jughead says, returning to her and pulling her into his arms. “Though I’m glad they served you well.” He flashes a cheeky grin at her and walks her toward the washing machine that has his clothes in it (he’d  _ actually  _ brought laundry down with him, the poor sweet angel), lifting her onto it with an ease that continues to surprise her.

 

Betty lifts a hand to his hair, now covered again by his beanie, and tucks a stray lock beneath the worn grey fabric. “It doesn’t have to stop there, you know,” she says softly, trying to catch his eye.

 

He seems preoccupied with an errant thread on her shoulder, but Betty can see his jaw muscle twitch anxiously. He swallows and then opens his mouth, purportedly to reply to her, but he quickly shuts it again when the telltale sound of Archie singing one of his more depressing melodies becomes evident from down the hallway. Jughead’s eyes dart quickly to Betty, who shakes her head slightly at him. He nods, and in one swift move he grabs her hips, lifts her onto a different machine, and opens the lid of his washer. 

 

“Archie naked, Archie naked,” Betty hears him chant near-silently as he glances down at his crotch. She lifts a hand to her mouth, trying to suppress a giggle, and puts a broad smile on her face to distract Archie while Jughead deals with his  _ problem.  _

 

The door swings open and Archie appears, carrying a laundry basket that is overburdened with dirty clothes.  _ “I’ll try, I’ll tryyy -  _ oh, hey guys,” he says. “Fancy meeting you here. Laundry time, huh?”

 

“Yep,” Jughead croaks. He’s bent so far over his washer that his head is practically inside it. Betty wants to laugh, but she decides to take pity on him and nods at Archie instead.

 

“Yeah, I was just keeping Jughead company,” she says cheerfully, which isn’t a total lie. “Are we still going out for Thai tonight with Veronica?”

 

Archie plops his basket down on a washing machine beside the one Betty’s sitting on. “As far as I know, yeah. Though I’m not sure of the point, if she’s not going to order any of the spicy dishes.” 

 

“Some of us have delicate stomachs, Andrews,” Betty says, swinging her heels against the machine she’s sitting on. She risks a glance at Jughead, who is standing straighter again, his issue seeming to be handled in some way. He still looks kind of uncomfortable, though, and he keeps his back to Archie while he moves his clothes into a dryer.

 

“That’s fine, Jug and I can share the spicy ones then.” Archie pours what definitely doesn’t seem to be an appropriate amount of detergent into the washer, then drops the lid, inserts his quarter, and starts the cycle. “Well, I’m gonna go for a run. See you guys around seven - or probably before that for you, Jug.”

 

“Yeah, bye,” Jughead says, barely glancing back as he waves at his friend. Betty manages to hold her giggles in until Archie is gone and definitely far enough down the hallway that he can’t hear her, then lets them out in a torrent of laughter. Jughead turns toward her and levels her with a raised eyebrow. “I’m glad you found that so amusing, seeing as how you were the cause of that, Betts.”

 

Betty’s jaw drops. “Me?! You’re the one who asked if I wanted to do laundry!”

 

“I  _ am  _ doing laundry,” Jughead says, gesturing with his hand toward the dryer. “And okay, maybe fool around a little, but you’re the one wearing that - that  _ bra-thing.” _

 

“Bra- _ lette,”  _ Betty pronounces. “For the tenth time, I swear. Bralette. And yeah, I wore it specifically because it gets that reaction out of you.”

 

“Aha!” Jughead says triumphantly, pointing at her. “A confession.”

 

Betty hops off the washer and folds her arms. “Forgive me for trying to be attractive to you,” she mutters, turning to the side. “Maybe if I tried a little harder, you’d want to actually have sex with me.” Her cheeks start to burn the moment the words slip from her mouth, but it’s already too late. She can’t take them back. Betty figures the next best thing she can do is leave, but they’re also adults and goddamn it, she’s standing here until she can figure out what the hell is going on with him.

 

Jughead looks like somebody has slapped him in the face. “You think I don’t want to have sex with you?” he repeats. “Are you serious?”

 

Betty swallows. “What am I supposed to think? I’ve been throwing myself at you for weeks - the farthest you’ll go is that!” She points at the door. “Am I - is there something wrong?”

 

“Jesus, no,” he says, moving to her side immediately. He cups her face and kisses her swiftly. “Betty, absolutely no. I just - I’m not that experienced.” Jughead looks away, his cheeks flushed red, and drops his hands from her. “Which I’m sure is not a surprise. I’m not a - I’ve  _ had  _ sex,” he clarifies. “Just not a lot, and not recently. But believe me, it’s  _ not  _ you. I’m just … nervous, I guess. Don’t want to disappoint you.” He glances back at her face. “And I really would like to take you on an actual date first.” 

 

_ This sweet boy,  _ Betty thinks, catching his hands in hers. “Juggie,” she says in a gentle tone, that doesn’t matter to me. Date, no date - experience, no experience. You’re definitely - I mean,  _ that  _ over there just now was pretty amazing. You obviously know what you’re doing.”

 

Jughead exhales and gives her a small smile of relief. “You’d be surprised what you can learn on the internet.”

 

Betty stands on her tiptoes and kisses him softly. “And while I’m sure you  _ won’t  _ need it, you’d be surprised what you can learn as you go,” she purrs, batting her eyelashes at him and letting her hand fall to the belt loops on his jeans. “I’m not saying I’m Miss Experienced either, but I’ve always been a quick learner and - well, I did win a volunteer award in high school for best tutor.”

 

Jughead chuckles and wraps his arms around her shoulders, pulling her close. She feels the press of his lips on the top of her head, his chest still rumbling with relaxing laughter, and he says, “Okay.”

 

\--

 

They make plans for their first official date (again) for a couple of days later. Jughead had proposed dinner, but Betty has a slight fear that anything in public would somehow get hijacked by Veronica once again, so they compromise on dinner in - at her apartment, of course, given that he shares his with Archie. This time she insisted on cooking as well, so before she goes to school Betty puts a pork tenderloin in the slow cooker. 

 

She spends the morning in class, fiddling with her perpetually short fingernails and only half-paying attention. As soon as her seminar is over, Betty grabs her bag and hurries down the hallway, needing to get to work. The conference is just around the corner, and now that the large pieces are in place, there is a barrage of smaller, slightly less significant items that have come to her boss’s attention. There is no way she’s staying late today, so she definitely needs to get there on time - but then she turns the corner, and there he is. 

 

He’s sitting outside a classroom with his earbuds in and his head down, but Jughead glances up when Betty approaches and she can’t help but smile at the happy look that suddenly comes across his face. She’s in a hurry, but she stops to give him a quick kiss anyway, loving the wide grin he give her immediately after. He has a generally sullen vibe on most days and doesn’t seem to smile all that often, but he’s seemed happier lately and she feels honoured that she might be some small part of that.

 

Fifteen minutes later, Betty is at her desk, elbow-deep in dietary restrictions and catering options. Her phone buzzes in her bag. She grabs it quickly; it’s a text from Jughead.  **_That skirt is really working for me._ ** She licks her lips and smiles to herself, glancing down at the light grey pencil skirt and navy top that she’d put on that morning.  **_Glad you like it,_ ** she replies,  **_I can’t wait for tonight :)._ ** She puts her phone back in her bag and resumes work on the catering plan, but her mind is definitely elsewhere.

  
  


When Betty gets home from work, she pulls the pork, mixes some more sauce in, and lets the flavours sit together in the slow-cooker for another hour. She uses ten minutes of that hour to make fresh coleslaw; the other fifty minutes is spent choosing an outfit. Ultimately, Betty decides that just because their date is at her apartment, that doesn’t mean that she can’t put effort in as though they were going out. She selects a green dress that Veronica had once told her made her eyes look pretty. It has a tasteful V-neck, cinches at the waist and flows to just above her knees.

 

(Betty also puts a few condoms in her bedside drawer, just in case. She doesn’t want to be presumptuous, but it never hurts to be prepared.)

 

Jughead knocks on her door at 6:45, fifteen minutes early. Betty opens the door with a slight frown. “You okay?” she asks, stepping aside as he steps in.

 

“Archie went out to pick up beer,” Jughead says, closing the door behind himself. “Figured I would escape while he was gone rather than make up an excuse later. Are you sure we can’t just tell them?” He turns back to her, and his eyes fall across her. He smiles. “Wow, you look amazing, Betty.”

 

“Thank you.” Betty flits back to the kitchen, not quite finished with arranging the selection of vessels for the pulled pork - bread, buns, soft tacos. She carries the tray to the table and chews on her lower lip. “It’s not like I don’t want them to know, Juggie. But you’ve seen Veronica in action. I love her, but--”

 

“She’s crazy,” Jughead supplies, nodding. He walks over to her and slips his arms around her waist. “I know.” He shrugs. “I’ll do whatever you want. It’s not like I’m an open book anyway. But it  _ is  _ weird keeping something like this from Archie.”

 

Betty nods, feeling a little guilty. She’d considered the ramifications of their silence on her relationship with Veronica, but she hadn’t thought about the fact that Jughead and Archie weren’t just friends: they were essentially brothers, and close ones at that. “One more week,” she promises, spreading her palms on his chest. “Just let me have you to myself for one more week.”

 

“Okay.” Jughead kisses her. “Smells good, by the way. What did you make?”

 

“Pulled pork.” Betty pulls away from his grasp so that she can continue to bring dinner to the table. “Sit. Please.”

 

He does, and she carries both the pulled pork and coleslaw over to him. Jughead unconsciously licks his lips but politely waits for her to sit down as well before he digs in. He starts off with a bun and quickly moves onto a soft tortilla, then eats three-quarters of the coleslaw before Betty has even finished one tortilla. She marvels at his ability to eat an unending amount of food, having absolutely no idea where all of it  _ goes.  _ Sure, he seems to work out a little, but it can’t possibly be often enough to maintain his slender frame with that calorie load.

 

When she mentions it, he says, “I have a fast metabolism,” and moves onto the bread option.

 

Betty had anticipated having to deal with leftovers, but when Jughead finally pushes himself back from the table twenty minutes later, apparently satisfied, she realizes that that’s not going to be an issue. Archie seems to eat a lot too (although his appetite is clearly fuelled by the need for  _ “gainz,  _ Betty, with a Z”), and she is briefly curious about just how much food Archie’s dad would’ve needed to buy to sate them both - especially when they both actually  _ were  _ growing boys. Still thinking about it, she moves to rise so that she can clear their plates, but Jughead beats her to it and gestures with his hand for her to sit down.

 

“You cooked, I’ll clean,” he says simply.

 

Betty smiles and crosses her legs, angling her chair so that she’s facing toward him rather than away. “Thank you,” she says, folding her hands on her lap.

 

Jughead shrugs as he fills the sink with soapy water. “No problem. Besides, this pulled pork dish is a little messy, and I wouldn’t want your dress to get dirty.”

 

“I didn’t realize you were so concerned about the cleanliness of my dress.” She catches his eye from across the counter and winks at him.

 

Jughead gives her a slightly nervous half-grin and rinses the coleslaw bowl, setting it in the drying rack. “It’s my top priority.” She watches his Adam’s apple bob with a hard swallow, then he adds, “In fact, you should probably just take it off, we wouldn’t want to risk anything.”

 

Betty giggles a little at the proposition and bites her lower lip. “You know,” she begins conversationally, “that’s not a terrible idea. For the dress’s sake.” She stands up and reaches around to her side, tugging the zipper down. His eyes are hot on her skin as she steps out of the fabric and folds it neatly across the back of the chair, now clad only in her matching dark blue lace underwear set. 

 

He’s staring at her, his already piercing gaze darkening by the second, and Betty feels any insecurities she has about her stomach and thighs immediately fall away. He looks almost hungry, as though he hadn’t just eaten three-quarters of a pork tenderloin and she is a full buffet. Remember her mother’s incessant nags about posture, Betty straightens her shoulders and back, holding her chest with confidence and walks around the countertop into the kitchen.

 

“I’m washing dishes,” Jughead says weakly, but his hands are already reaching for a towel.

 

“I think the plates should probably soak,” she says, her hands resting on the waistband of his jeans. “Don’t you?”

 

He swallows and nods quickly. “Yeah. Uh, definitely yes.” He dries his hands hastily and then chucks the dish towel to the side. It lands on the floor, but he’s already kissing her and Betty can’t bring herself to care. He pulls her flush against him and his hands slide frantically across her skin, like he can’t decide where to touch first. He drags them from her back to her waist and then down to her ass. He gropes at it eagerly as though it’s the first time he’s ever touched her, and she giggles into his mouth.

 

“I didn’t realize that you would be such a butt guy,” Betty teases, pulling at his shirt with her own hands.

 

Jughead lets go of her for a moment so that she can pull his shirt over his head. It joins the dish towel on the floor, but Betty again barely has time to register it. He spins her around so that her back is flush to his chest and presses her into the edge of the countertop, his lips attached to the side of her neck. “I’m really into your boobs too,” he says, his hands sliding up to cup her breasts. “Equal opportunity admirer of all things Betty.”

 

He’s both sweet and rough, a mess of contradictions. Betty a big fan of effective juxtaposition. “Prove it,” she challenges, wiggling her hips so that her ass rubs against his already obvious hardness.

 

And he does, picking her up and carrying her into the bedroom without needing to be told twice. Jughead lays her on the bed, but instead of jumping on with her and continuing his frantic kitchen pace, he just fucking  _ looks  _ at her. He takes his jeans off slowly, his gaze tracing along the lines of her body until he reaches her eyes, and he swallows. “I swear to god, you’re not real.”

 

Jughead rests one of his knees on the mattress. Betty can see the nerves in his face, but there’s something else, too: happiness. She raises her back a little and reaches behind herself to unclasp her bra, then drops it on the floor beside the bed.

 

“Jesus fuck,” he breathes, quickly stopping her hands as they move down to remove her underwear. “No, please. Let me do it.”

 

Betty nods and stretches her arms over her head. She lifts her hips slightly as he slides her panties down her legs, then musters all the confidence that she has in her and smiles at him in what she hopes is a reassuring way. She knew he’d be anxious when it came to this; what she hadn’t counted on was her being nervous, too. 

 

“You are so, so beautiful, Betty,” Jughead says, his voice full of awe as he comes to lay beside her. He props himself up on his left elbow and sets his other hand on her hip, thumb brushing over the bone that protrudes ever-so-slightly.

 

“You’re not that bad yourself,” she says, her heart beating quickly under the intensity of his gaze. She swallows and reaches down, snapping the waistband of his boxers. “You’re gonna need to take those off.”

 

“In a second,” he says almost absentmindedly. Betty watches his face carefully; he’s gazing at his own hand as it slides slowly up the side of her body and pauses on her ribcage. He leans down and all she can see for a moment is his messy black hair until his lips touch her stomach gently. “Perfect,” he mumbles, almost inaudibly.

 

_ Perfect.  _ It’s a word that’s haunted Betty all her life. It’s what she’s been chasing from a young age, and she hates it. It made her knuckles white, her stomach growl, her head hurt, and it killed her sister. It’s never been good; it never could be, not for her.

 

But right now, as she lays here under his hands and his mouth and he says it to her, she believes it. For the first time, it’s real. Unexpected tears sting behind her eyes and Betty quickly blinks them away, choosing instead to thread her fingers through his mess of wavy hair as he moves up her body. His hand slides to the side of her breast and then over it completely. She exhales warm satisfaction as he kneads her breast gently and then releases it, only to take her nipple into his mouth moments later.

 

_ “Jug,”  _ she whines, rubbing her legs together in an attempt at friction. “I can’t believe you thought wouldn’t be good at -  _ ohmigod.”  _

 

He bites down gently on the peak, flicking his tongue against her skin briefly, and chuckles against her breast when she lets out a quiet half-scream. Jughead switches to her other breast, leaving the left one puffy and wet from his mouth, and slips his hand between her legs.

 

Betty is nearly there in minutes, but manages to summon all of her strength to stop him before she comes. “Get on your back,” she orders, breathing heavily, “and take those damn boxers off.”

 

For a moment Jughead almost looks scared, but he nods his understanding and hurriedly slips his boxers off, fumbling as they get stuck on his foot. Betty reaches over to her bedside table, thanking herself for her habit of preparation, and grabs one of the condoms that she’d put there earlier. Then she goes back and straddles him, grinning mischievously, and rolls the condom on.

 

“Ready?” she asks.

 

He’s gripping her hips so tightly that she’s pretty sure she’ll have bruises from his thumbs in the morning. The idea of it just makes her even more eager to have him inside her, and when he nods quickly, Betty lifts herself onto her knees and then sinks down onto him slowly, eyes closing. She breathes deeply and takes a moment to let her body adjust to him. He’s probably only slightly above average in size, at least in her fairly limited experience, but it’s been awhile for her too.

 

Her eyes open after a few beats. They fall on Jughead, whose mouth is partly open in a blissful smile and whose eyes are trained on hers. She bites her lip and grabs his hands, sliding them up her body. “Hi,” she whispers, beginning to slowly roll her hips.

 

“Hey,” he replies, giving her the same happy smile that he had earlier that day on campus. He starts to thrust upward, moving his own hips slightly. It takes them a few minutes to get a good rhythm, but once they fall into sync Jughead lets out a groaning noise that Betty thinks  _ should  _ be unattractive, but somehow isn’t. “I’m not going to last very long,” he warns her, thumbs sweeping across her breasts again.

 

“That’s okay,” Betty pants, her eyelids fluttering as she moves. “Can you - please - here--” she breathes, lifting her hand from his abdomen to between her own legs, just above where they’re joined.

 

Jughead’s hand covers hers immediately, dropping from her breast in record time. He manages to somehow match the counterclockwise circles of his thumb to the joint rhythm of their hips. Betty lets out a string of profanities that ends with,  _ “Oh god, Juggie,”  _ and when she comes she swears there’s a glint of pride in his eyes. Betty rides out her high with him, and then clutches at his arms for support when he follows not long after. She doesn’t move for a few moments, seemingly unable to, then slowly lifts herself off and falls beside him on the bed. She looks over, aware of her own happy smile, and giggles at the blissed-out expression on his face.

 

“Betty, you are  _ incredible,”  _ he says, leaning over and kissing her softly. “That was unreal.”

 

Betty giggles, watching him get up and remove the condom. “It was pretty amazing,” she agrees, stretching her legs out. She needs to get up and pee, but her bed has somehow never been more comfortable than it is right now and she’s less than inclined to do so.

 

Jughead disappears into the bathroom briefly. Betty hears the toilet flush, then he then comes back out and pulls his boxers back on. “Is it weird that I’m hungry?” he asks, looking adorably rumpled.

 

“You’re you, so no,” Betty laughs, sitting up and grabbing her underwear. “But we did just eat, so yes.” She pecks his lips, then slips into the bathroom briefly. She uses the facilities and tugs her panties back on, but hangs her bra on the back of the door and walks back out to him.

 

The room smells faintly like sex, but Betty doesn’t care. Jughead is laying in the bed again, propped up on some pillows, and she crawls in beside him. “For the record, you had nothing to be nervous about,” she tells him, resting her head on his shoulder and sliding one of her hands across his abdomen. “That was awesome.”

 

He kisses her temple. “Yeah, I guess I’m just a natural,” he says, slipping an arm around her.

 

Betty giggles and pokes his side. “I’m never giving you a compliment again.” 

 

Jughead laughs and cuddles her closer, shifting down slightly. His hand draws her face upward and he presses a soft kiss to her lips. “Thanks for putting up with me,” he says quietly, his thumb caressing her jaw. “I mean it. I really,  _ really  _ like you, and I’m sorry about the months of me being too much of a chicken shit to do anything about it.”

 

She shrugs and smiles at him. “It’s okay. I had fun teasing you.” 

 

“So did Archie,” Jughead bemoans, dropping his head back to the pillow. “‘Jug, guess what Betty’s wearing on Halloween?’” he mimics. “‘Jug, you should come,  _ Betty  _ will be there.’”

 

“Veronica was no better,” Betty assures him, snuggling deeper under the covers. “She’s going to freak out when she finds out we’ve been seeing each other.”

 

“About that.” Jughead clears his throat, his tone suddenly more serious than before, and Betty looks up in faint alarm. “Just how  _ are  _ you going to tell her? Text? What if she’s  _ at  _ my apartment when you do? I have nowhere to hide, Betty.”

 

“I hadn’t thought that far ahead,” she admits. “I dunno. Any ideas?” 

 

“Hmm.” His hand snakes underneath the covers and caresses one of her breasts. “We could pull a Janet Jackson, take a picture of me covering your boobs with my hands and send it to her.”

 

Betty’s jaw drops. “Juggie!” she giggles, smacking his hand away. “No!” 

 

Jughead laughs into her neck. “I’m obviously kidding.” He hauls her closer, spreading his palm flat against her back. “We could always just tell Archie and let him deal with it.”

 

Betty’s eyebrow raises. “That’s actually not a terrible idea.” She presses her lips together and breathes into his shoulder for a moment. He’s so warm, so comfortable, so  _ him.  _ And she’s done pretending. “Fuck it,” she says, “let’s tell him now.”

 

“Now?”

 

“Yeah.” Betty rolls away from him for a moment and leans down off the bed, grabbing his jeans. She finds the cell phone in his pocket and comes back up with it. “Here,” she says, thrusting it at him. “Text him.”

 

Jughead looks at her apprehensively. “Are you sure? It’s cool with me, but you said--”

 

“I know,” she says dismissively, waving her hand. “I changed my mind.”

 

“Oookay.” He pulls up his text conversation with Archie, which seems to Betty to mostly be filled with phrases like  **_dude, where you at_ ** and  **_Bud or PBR?_ ** She watches him type a new message and laughs at him when it simply reads  **_BTW I am dating Betty now._ **

 

“You’re funny,” Betty says, rolling her eyes. “What about something more like, ‘sorry I didn’t tell you this earlier, but Betty and I have been seeing each other for the past few’ - Juggie, did you  _ send that?!”  _

 

Jughead shrugs. “What? If he needs to know anything more he’ll ask.”

 

Her jaw drops. “It was so ... undetailed, there’s no way that that’s going to--”

 

Archie’s reply interrupts her, and Jughead smirks as he reads it aloud. “He says  **_that’s awesome, dude,_ ** then he asked if I ate the leftover spaghetti we had yesterday.”

 

Betty shakes her head in disbelief. “If this is how men deal with things, why is the world so fucked up?” she asks rhetorically. A moment later, a cell phone starts ringing in the other room, and Betty looks at Jughead forlornly. “Do you think Archie will give Veronica lessons?”

  
  


**fin**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I appreciate all the support you guys have given me over this and all of my writing here. Thank you again, and please leave a comment!


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